
Hi Michael. You definitely picked up on what I consider to be an interesting challenge and perhaps the greatest opportunity for improving user experience. I am not sure I have hit on the perfect formula for this, but I do think the low barrier-to-entry solutions have to begin at home in our local environments. And that means that those of us in leadership positions have to start with evaluating the skills we have on board currently and do a gap analysis on the ecosystem. At UC Berkeley we have been lucky enough to start with some instructional development staff, and we have been able to grow that and build stronger partnerships with other campus units in this domain as well (Library, OED, Grad Instruction). However, as a campus we were completely deficient in the UI side of the house (also Project Mgmt., but that is another article and frankly since engaging in community source projects I am beginning to think we all need a new breed of agile PMs . . .).
This may be controversial, but I don't think the right way to approach this is through the traditional faculty committee advisory group. This can get us trapped in serving individual wish lists. I think we can learn a lot from the needs assessment and field work from the User Experience field and find a way to apply that both at a project level and a slightly higher level.
One of our challenges at a large university is visibility. We are often addressing the majority need and hear from the minority. I know there is a way to engage faculty in the community source process that may also help them move beyond their silo. I truly believe it matches the values of higher education, and we staff need to find ways of communicating that better. The recent SakaiCal symposium that was hosted down at Claremont McKenna College had a very nice mix of faculty, librarians, technologists. It was well balanced. That gave me hope, but it still tended to slip into a ”what are you going to do for me” tone. I think UX folks can become the translators and bridge that gap. The problem is that we don't have enough of them. We haven't yet created the balanced ecosystem.
So as usual, change starts at home.
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