Designing the Student Experience

When designing content, prioritize your audience. Is the language something they will understand? Will the images appeal to them without interfering with other elements? Will they be able to gain necessary information from this content?

After class, students visit Brightspace to find their assignments for the evening, and with a little planning, this is where students could also see carefully curated tips and reminders from you, the instructor. Brightspace is not just a place to house documents, but rather an extension of your classroom that you can use to reinforce connections between topics in your course and build a welcoming atmosphere beyond the few hours you see students face-to-face.

Considering the Audience:

23% of Bentley’s current first-year class are first-generation students according to the Bentley Equity Experience Report, which means they may lack cultural capital, specifically social and navigational capital. As a result, they may be facing the typical struggles of a first-year student with less knowledge and support than their peers. Students also come to your class with varying capabilities for time management and self-advocacy. The average instructor, however, is used to balancing the demands of several classes, in addition to research and/or professional obligations. Keep this in mind when designing your courses in Brightspace.

As students balance priorities such as work, school, family obligations, and more, reinforcing good organizational habits and connections between materials in your Brightspace course can help students work more efficiently outside of class and master material more quickly. The strategies below will not only make your class more accessible, but also create a memorable student experience in the classroom and beyond.

1. White Space

Sometimes omissions are just as important as what you include. Any area of an image or layout that is not occupied by images, text, or shapes is called white space. Humans have a finite amount of cognitive processing power when approaching content, and Connie Malamed (2015) points out that white space “gives the eyes a place to rest [. . . and] makes it easy to perceive and mentally process information” (p.48). Packing content too tightly has the potential to overwhelm students, especially if they are encountering your subject matter for the first time.

Some of Brightspace’s features are built specifically to address this concern. The Visual Table of Contents provides ample space between the units in your course. Additionally, the Course Home page inserts space between the individual widgets, clearly demarcating each unique item.  Inside the content area, units, lessons, and folders are designed to be containers rather than content-heavy items. Typically, they should include an image and a short description at most. This gives learners a visual and mental break before they dive into denser content inside the pages and documents housed on your Brightspace site.

2. Consistency is Key

In class, consistent routines help students understand expectations and transition more easily between activities. Use Brightspace to reinforce this structure and continue building trust with students through their experience online. Brightspace allows you to schedule announcements, which means you can ensure that students see friendly tips or reminders about due dates at consistent times throughout the week. If you build a specific page to house your agenda for class or other chunks of content, reuse that page to create signals for your students. Simple visual elements can reinforce those signals, and you can use free platforms like Canva or Adobe Express to create your own banners.

3. Making Connections

Our brains commit new concepts to memory by connecting them to what we already know. According to José Antonio Bowen (2021), “A density of connections means more ways to find things” (p.55), meaning that we are more able to commit material to long-term memory when we have experienced it in a variety of contexts. Students will come into your course with experiences that help them contextualize your course material, and if you can demonstrate connections either with those experiences or with previous material that students have mastered, it will help cement those concepts in long-term memory. The agenda pages mentioned above serve not only as visual signals but can also narrativize the connections between your course materials.

One of the easiest ways to reinforce these connections is through the organization of materials within your Brightspace course. Depending on how you sort your course materials on your hard drive, it may be tempting to organize your materials by file type. However, organizing your materials with the learner’s workflow in mind encourages them to make connections not only between new concepts and things they already know, but also between assigned readings and the activities students are asked to complete, answering the age-old question: “Why are we doing this?”

Brightspace offers endless possibilities to personalize your course, but ultimately it is a tool designed to convey a meaningful learning experience when students are working independently. By creating your content intentionally and leveraging the tools that already exist within Brightspace, you can create a site that is both aesthetically pleasing and helps students learn more effectively.

Works Cited:

José Antonio Bowen. (2021). Teaching change : how to develop independent thinkers using relationships, resilience, and reflection. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Castro-Alonso, J.C., de Koning, B.B., Fiorella, L. et al. (2021) “Five Strategies for Optimizing Instructional Materials: Instructor- and Learner-Managed Cognitive Load.” Educational Psychology Review 33, 1379–1407. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-021-09606-9

Malamed, C. (2015). Visual Design Solutions : principles and creative inspiration for learning professionals. Wiley.

Would you like help implementing the strategies discussed above? E-mail learningdesign@bentley.edu to schedule a consultation with one of our Instructional Designers!