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Tisch Library
Tufts University
35 Professors Row
Medford, MA 02155
Bring our goals and values to designing online learning objects?
How to Use This Guide
This guide is designed to provide pedagogical suggestions to employ while developing online learning content. The suggestions are inspired by critical digital pedagogy, universal design for learning, and design thinking. All three of these approaches to developing online learning content are driven by the same factor: empathy.
We must center empathy for our students in every aspect of the design process.
On this page you'll find resources to develop your empathy skills. The other pages of the guide go deeper into other elements of the design process and how we can be inspired by our goals and values along the way.
Empathy
How to identify student needs through empathy
How does a librarian empathize with their students? We may not all be able to develop relationships with our students that allow us to observe and ask questions about their library usage, needs, and desires. However, there are some other tricks we can use to try to understand what our students need.
Empathize
Let's go deeper - put yourself in your students' shoes. Ask yourself a lot of questions about what your student might be experiencing and why. Assume a beginner's mindset while asking yourself these questions about the student's learning journey in order to identify possible barriers.
- What assumptions am I making about my users and their needs?
- What are they trying to achieve?
- What skills and knowledge do they already have?
- What barriers to learning do they encounter?
Another useful resource to help you empathize with your users is UCLA WI+RE's empathy map. Make a copy of the empathy map template and complete it with your own learning challenge. I used the template to make the following example for the challenge of writing an annotated bibliography:
Resources for Empathy
Here are some resources to help you put yourself in the student's shoes:
