UX Design for Interactive Media

Course Design · Case study

Designing a new Digital Media Arts course from industry competencies: backward-designed, competency-based, authentically assessed, and built to a recognized online-quality standard. This is the course I am the subject-matter expert on.

Goal

Take a Digital Media Arts student from no user-experience background to a defensible portfolio case study, and assess the competency rather than the artifact. The course is designed so that what a student can produce, explain, and defend is the evidence, which is also what makes it resistant to generative substitution.

Audience

Community college students at a Hispanic-Serving Institution, many first-generation and balancing work with school, most arriving with a graphic-design or visual foundation and no UX. The design assumes design sensibility but no research, prototyping, or systems experience, and never lets the software become the reason a student stops.

Process

Outcomes

This course is approved and being built for the Digital Media Arts curriculum; it has not run yet. The course is designed backward from its outcomes (Wiggins & McTighe): I start from eleven industry competencies, define the evidence that would prove each one, and only then design the activities that build toward that evidence. Every competency is held in constructive alignment (Biggs), so the outcomes, the assessments, and the activities all point at the same target, and the alignment matrix is built as the course is built rather than reconstructed afterward. Each competency, written with the advisory board, is an observable action at a stated cognitive level (I through VI, low to high).

How success is measured

The course separates formative and summative assessment on purpose. Formative work carries the learning: low-stakes practice, self-checks, a scaffolded critique loop, and interactive simulations that let a student rehearse professional judgment before it counts. Summative work carries the proof: a defended case study built on the student’s own chosen problem.

Every graded task is authentic (Wiggins), anchored to the student’s own work and a real design decision they can defend out loud. Points sit on the process and the reasoning, the research, the rationale, and the response to critique, not only on the finished file. Four interactive simulations do the formative heavy lifting: a heuristic-evaluation simulator, a usability-test role-play, an affinity-mapping and card sort, and a spot-the-barrier accessibility check.

The defense is a recorded case-study walkthrough followed by live questions on why each decision was made. A model can generate a screen; it cannot sit in the room and account for fifteen weeks of a student’s own choices.

Pacing and interaction

Eight modules carry the competencies, and a single through-line project runs the length of the course so the work compounds into one defensible case study rather than disconnected exercises.

Underneath the rhythm: cognitive load theory (Sweller), content chunked so a beginner is never fighting the tool and the idea at once; scaffolding, each project built on the last; and self-regulated learning (Zimmerman), students plan, monitor, and reflect on their own work. The course also draws on connectivism and personal learning environments, the focus of my own M.Ed., so students leave building their own network of tools and sources, not just a finished file. Regular and Substantive Interaction is built into every week, an announcement and check-in rhythm, the Discord critique loop with post-by and reply-by cadence, and a stated feedback timeline, rather than bolted on at the end.

Access

The course is designed for learner variability from the start rather than retrofitted for it, applying the three principles of Universal Design for Learning: multiple means of engagement (student-chosen problems, relevance, a critique community), multiple means of representation (every concept in more than one modality, captioned and scripted video, a key-terms glossary), and multiple means of action and expression (varied ways to demonstrate learning). Accessibility is designed to WCAG 2.1 AA from the first draft, not audited on afterward.

Technology

The course-builder skill keeps the course aligned to the standards on every pass. The three agents on the panel each review from a different seat and catch what one designer working alone misses. This is different from my synthetic-SME demonstrations, where the subject-matter expert is itself an AI agent; here I am the subject-matter expert (AI-assisted course design).

No single open textbook spans these competencies, so the course uses a vetted mix, with licensing stated on every resource. It is built to the SUNY OSCQR online-course-quality rubric alongside the department’s alignment and workload criteria, with estimated seat hours on every module held to the credit-hour budget. (OSCQR is applied under a Creative Commons license; Nielsen Norman Group heuristics are cited; not affiliated with or endorsed by SUNY.)