Closing Classroom Gaps with Customer Experience Principles

Teaching and learning in higher ed during this pandemic has been nothing short of challenging for instructors. They’ve been forced to quickly bridge classroom gaps in time, place, distance, and student modalities. An effective response to these challenges has been to transform existing courses into effective, new HyFlex (hybrid flexible) courses.

This HyFlex course format has been enjoying success because it combines both face-to-face and online learning. Each class session and their related learning activities are offered both synchronously (online and in person) and asynchronously (archived online). However, this effectiveness comes with a great cost in terms of time and effort. Strategically, this format requires rethinking the entire traditional student experience—how they engage with the instructor, the course content, and their relationships with fellow classmates. Tactically, the instructor must also develop, distribute and organize this new curriculum.

Technology is an essential ingredient to these HyFlex courses so all students can participate wherever, whenever, and however they can. User Experience (UX) design can help with the online components but not the face-to-face ones. It’s a lot of work leaving instructors with potentially lots of moving pieces and dead ends. How can instructors save time and minimize frustrations in terms of getting all of the pieces within a HyFlex puzzle to fit? How do students enter, remain, and leave the course feeling both enlightened and energized?

My goal for 2021 is to look deeper into the principles of Customer Experience (CX) Design for guidance in planning and creating these new, all-inclusive learning experiences. Why?

First, CX Design clarifies all of the many different touchpoints in the customer’s “journey” to “conversion”—a sale, subscription, or service. A design team must articulate each and every way in and out, before, during and after this experience in order to satisfy and delight customers, which creates a strong customer-brand relationship. HyFlex Instructors must also define the synchronous and asynchronous touchpoints in the journey in the student’s learning, leaving them feeling supported, also creating a strong student-instructor relationship.

Also, CX Design is about connecting customers with brand communities. A brand may have a superior product or service but it won’t amount to much if it can’t reach its customers at their various stages of encountering it. HyFlex instructors face the same dilemma. An instructor will face difficulties if unable to connect the face-to-face and online components within the classroom community no matter how compelling the curriculum.

Finally, CX Design makes customers a priority. With CX design, a brand reaches deep into customers’ thoughts and feelings in order to engage them and to make them feel like they matter. HyFlex Instructors make students their priority. A well-defined HyFlex course experience like a well-defined CX design will provide students with the benefits of community and leave them feeling valued.

Here are a couple of CX resources that I’m finding helpful in both understanding and practicing CX Design.