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Empathy as a Daily, Learner-Inclusive Exercise
Elena Semeyko
Instructional Designer, Google via Artech Stanford Graduate School of Education ’19
Can empathy be measured? I don’t think we can create an absolute scale of it, but one metric that
I find useful is how often empathy is executed. In theory, we all care deeply about our learners. Yet, how often do we review educational products and learning experiences that we develop from a student’s point of view? Ideally, this should be a daily exercise, performed in every team discussion and focused on concrete questions like, “If our learners were in this room, what would they say about this initiative?” and “What will their emotions be?”
Empathy also means recognizing the diversity of learners, their backgrounds, and current situations. Will our design serve a person who is overwhelmed with work, who is depressed, who experiences learning difficulties, or who just has a slow Internet connection? It won’t, as long as we develop solutions for a utopian “average” learner: patient, attentive, studious, at peace, with all the time in the world to explore our product. That’s why it’s important to be explicit about what range of students we assist and represent all of them in learner personas.
Finally, nothing stimulates empathy better than conversations with real students. It’s hard not to become a learner advocate after hearing two or three emotional stories of users wasting half an hour on registration or getting a lower grade because of misleading content.
As has been stated many times in UX research, empathy is a muscle that should be trained daily. Let’s flex it without fear of getting sore!
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