Education Two Part Assignment

Design_for_Change_in_Higher_Education_----_1._Learning_Experience_Design_in_Higher_Education.pdf

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WitH tHe introduction providing the historical and institutional context for our work, this chapter is shaped by two claims that are important for the larger argument of the book. First, learning expe- rience design (LXD) names an increasingly critical practice in higher education. It also names a new type of academic professional, one who sits at the heart of design and change in higher education. Second, we believe the focus of design in higher education should be experience. These two claims suggest an even more important idea: the univer- sity itself is a designed experience (or set of more or less intentionally designed experiences), and any effort to reimagine higher education needs to begin with this idea. Every college or university provides stu- dents with a set of intentional learning experiences inside and outside the classroom, and all these experiences are within the boundaries of learning experience design.

One recent way into the conversation about LXD is the 2016 MIT Online Education Policy Initiative report, which argues for creating the role of the “learning engineer” in higher education, or what Mar- tin Smith describes as “people with terminal degrees in traditional academic disciplines who also have experience with design and inter-

1 Learning Experience Design

in Higher Education

Grabill, Jeffrey T., et al. Design for Change in Higher Education, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/franklin-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6845327. Created from franklin-ebooks on 2025-01-07 16:47:17.

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24 design for chAnge in higher educAtion

disciplinary collaboration and an appetite for bleeding-edge technol- ogy” (the notion of a learning engineer goes back at least to Herbert Simon).1 The MIT report expands: “Learning engineers must have a knowledge base in the learning sciences, familiarity with modern ed- ucation technology, and an understanding of and practice with design principles. Preferably, they will also have a deep grounding in a spe- cific discipline such as physics, biology, engineering, history, or music.”2

The focus on learning sciences and disciplinary knowledge is im- portant, as is the focus on design. Fortunately, we have decades of scholarly and practical work on university campuses in the scholar- ship of teaching and learning, which has built necessary expertise. Importantly, the National Research Council has underlined the need for developing and valuing disciplinary educational expertise. As they note in their report on discipline-based educational research (DBER), “DBER investigates learning and teaching in a discipline using a range of methods with deep grounding in the discipline’s priorities, world- view, knowledge, and practices. It is informed by and complementary to more general research on human learning and cognition.”3 To achieve the goals of transforming learning in the sciences, in other words, ed- ucational practices and learning design require expert disciplinary knowledge. Fortunately, such knowledge is easy to find on most uni- versity campuses. The work is to ensure that learning design is in- formed by it.

Conversations about new roles in higher education, like that of the learning engineer, recognize a need to develop new sorts of academic professionals who have both the domain expertise and the understand- ing of the university’s organizational culture to serve a critical func- tion for higher education. We see our work and stance as consistent with these conversations but with a shift from engineering to design (which isn’t necessarily a big shift). The more substantial shift is to “experience” and what that means for the truly remarkable scope for experience design in higher education. Before we get there, however, we think it is important to engage the existing conversation on learn- ing design because it will help to trace the conceptual shift that we believe could be transformative.

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In doing so, we are really not interested in definitional issues (e.g., what is learning design?) or contrasts with related or overlapping de- sign professions (e.g., instructional design).4 Definitional and profes- sional boundaries are simply not helpful at this moment. We need a big tent. We are very much interested in the conceptual shift from “instruction” to “learning” because it allows us to get to experience. Finally, and relatedly, we argue for an expansion in the domains in which learning experience design must work.

Designing Experiences to Support Learning

The purpose of this section is to come to terms with terms. In our own design practice, we wrestle with terms because they index profes- sional identities as much as they name professional practices. These terms constitute a field of argument, one that we share with a num- ber of colleagues practicing learning experience design across higher education.5

In most tellings, learning (experience) design (LD or LXD) emerged from a prior notion of instructional design, which has its own history and field of application—primarily in the design of online courses and programs, but with new layers added from design practices that first emerged outside of higher education. Soulis, Seitzinger, and Nicolet- tou argue that “learner experience design (sometimes learning expe- rience design) is an emerging approach to learning design that uses methods borrowed from related design disciplines such as user ex- perience design and service design thinking”6 Or as Whitney Kilgore describes this emergence:

Instructional designers, like web developers in the ’90s, historically had expertise in conveying content through a limited set of tools and plat- forms, such as a learning management system (LMS). LX designers, in contrast, merge design-thinking principles with curriculum develop- ment and the application of emerging technologies to help faculty tailor content to student behaviors and preferences. It cuts across disciplines and moves beyond the LMS: LX designers embrace graphic design,

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multimedia production, research-based standards and social media. They are partners to faculty throughout the program and course de- velopment process.7

Indeed, as Soulis, Seitzinger, and Nicolettou continue, LXD often needs “to orchestrate the design for products (such as learning re- sources), systems (such as a course shell in a learning management system) and services (such as timely feedback or discussion facilita- tion).”8 The picture of the profession that has emerged, as the Horizon Report characterizes it, is one in which

the instructional design role has seen growth and professional recog- nition beyond standard course design and development. Additional responsibilities such as project management, learning analytics, edu- cational research, faculty mentorship and collaboration, and more academic autonomy have elevated the professional identities and expertise of instructional designers. New methods, processes, and scholarly work are emerging from teaching, learning, and technology communities, introducing new pathways and titles such as learning experience designer (LXD) and learning engineer. Many of these roles are well situated to be high-impact agents of change at their institutions, as they embody and promote student-centered and inclusive mindsets in their collaborations with faculty, students, and staff.9

This is a serviceable story of how learning design and learning ex- perience design emerge from instructional design. Again, instruc- tional design’s relationship to learning experience design is interest- ing to us not because one is better or more advanced than another. We are not telling a developmental story here. Far from it. We are inter- ested in what this story tells us about changing values in education and the emergent role of design.

The best way to see changes in value and focus is in the scholarly discourse that seeks to articulate an area of research and theory. In this version of the conversation, learning design is a new field in edu- cation that “seeks to develop a descriptive framework for teaching and learning activities . . . and to explore how this framework can assist

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learning experience design in higher education 27

educators to share and adopt great teaching ideas.”10 Research focused on developing such a descriptive framework is necessary to address the core practical problem “that teachers need support and guidance to make pedagogically informed design decisions to make appropri- ate use of technologies.”11 The work of Dalziel and others in this vol- ume tell a story of a field of research, and the frameworks presented describe (at a very high level) pedagogical moves, practices, and se- quences intended to be applicable to any educational activity. The designs that result are understood to be reusable and shareable pat- terns, applicable in any number of circumstances: a “pedagogical meta- model.”12

There are two significant implications from the fact that a field such as this emerges from a practical need in education. First, as Dobozy and Campbell remind us, the research responds to a real need to sup- port “learning designers and educational researchers and educators to document their design decisions and share their learning designs with the wider education community.”13 As we argue in this book, there is no design without research. Second, there is a clear shift via the research field from an inherited notion of (instructional) design focused on content delivery to an interest in more general patterns concerned with activity (e.g., pedagogical moves and practices) and the particularities of educational contexts (and the needed supports in those contexts). As Diana Laurilland argues, “we can only design the means by which there is a good chance that learning will take place.”14 We see in this disciplinary approach to learning design the intention to move from “instruction” to “learning” and toward a more developed design discourse appropriate for education.

The result of both practical and research conversations is a dy- namic area of research and practice. We see emergent in higher edu- cation a field that “is rapidly evolving through the influence of design thinking, user experience (UX) methods, systems design, advances in the learning sciences, and the emergence of learning analytics.”15 Consider figure 1.1, from the Dutch learning experience designer Niels Floor. As with all emergent ideas, learning experience design pulls

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28 design for chAnge in higher educAtion

from a number of existing practices, professional fields, and scholarly foundations. Many who read this will be able to locate themselves on a map like this—and add to it—but the radical space of this map is the center. Wendt writes, experience design is “the collective activities of multiple design practices including, but not limited to, design re- search, interaction design, visual design, industrial design, interface design, (information) architecture . . . concerned with the cumulative experiential qualities a user might have with a system, and therefore has its roots in psychology, cognitive sciences, anthropology, sociol- ogy, and philosophy, among others.”16

For a design organization like the Hub for Innovation in Learning and Technology, this expanded language, diverse set of related prac- tices, and multiple professional identities have been foundational. Our scope is much larger than online education or the course itself. Yes, we are interested in the moves that instructors and other educators make to support instruction, but fundamentally, we have shifted our focus toward students and their learning as of preferential interest and the

Figure 1.1. The World of Experience Design. Source: Dutch learning experience designer Niels Floor

HUMAN

Philosophy

Neuro science

(Cognitive) Psychology

Experiential Learning

Teaching

Training

Graphic Design

Industrial Design

Game Design

Interaction Design

User Experience Design

Applied Game Design

Instructional Design

Educational Expertise

GOAL

LEARNING DESIGNEXPERIENCE

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entirety of the university experience as our context. Our contextual commitments are to the experience. In this way, we see the emergence of LXD as intellectually critical to create an expansive design practice for higher education.

Our insistence that learning design focus on experience is an ar- gument, of course. To design from experience and toward (and for) new experiences introduces ideas into learning design practice and significantly expands where learning design can be applied. Our in- terest in experience builds on developments in learning design iden- tified above, but we want to nudge practice beyond “user experience” (though remain inclusive of it) and beyond the typical product-focused interests of product designers (yet we do like commitments to out- comes like “joy” and any number of affective outcomes that we can and should value in a learning experience). Our nudge to learning ex- perience design is a deep commitment to human experience in all its social, cultural, affective, embodied, and cognitive richness. Learning experiences at a university, if they are to be transformative, need to engage humans in ways that engage purpose and meaning. We cannot think and learn without feeling and connecting.17 Therefore, our learn- ing design practice entails a commitment to the cultural methods and tactics of the humanities and social sciences.

To illustrate what such a commitment looks like, we take a deep dive into the ideas of Christian Madsbjerg and Mikkel Rasmussen. Their ideas serve as a foundation for our orientation to the concept of experience. Madsbjerg and Rasmussen, in their book The Moment of Clarity, tell the story of a digital camera company trying to under- stand bewildering changes in how young people (and then many of us) used photos, a change that led to a significant decline in market share for their cameras. They could have approached the problem more tra- ditionally (How do we recapture market share?). Instead, they chose to go deep into human behavior: “What [the company] found—digital photography is a form of live theatre for the youth culture—was so much richer than something it might have come up with at a strategy session. Business implications followed organically: design cameras with easy tools for uploading directly to sites, and assume that because

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most photographs serve as a kind of fluid memory bank for users, make the search functions intuitive and allow them to quickly determine which photos will be permanent and which will be forgotten.”18

For Madsbjerg and Rasmussen, it has become clear that “man- agement science can tell you how many premium cups of coffee the average American drinks in a day, but phenomenology will help you understand what constitutes the experience of really good coffee.”19 Now, we have no intention of turning everyone into phenomenolo- gists (we aren’t), but dwelling with experience—“getting people right” in Madsbjerg and Rasmussen’s formulation—is worthwhile.

Madsbjerg and Rasmussen are committed to what they call “sense- making,” or the study of experiences for the purpose of moving from the ordinary and subjective to patterns of understanding that can inform decisions. Their thinking has helped us move from properties (e.g., male/female) to aspects, where meaning resides. For example, What does it mean to be an African American student on Michigan State University’s campus? What difference, if any, does it make if the student is from Detroit or elsewhere? What are the intersectional is- sues of concern for students? Understanding experience is the only way to get at key aspects of what it means for groups or any given in- dividual to be a student at MSU. Understanding experience and de- signing to create intentional experiences requires a focus on mean- ing and relationships (between people, objects, ideas, feelings, and so on). Understanding learning experiences provides design guidance for creating paths to an excellent education. To do so is complex, not sim- ple. To engage in design of this nature deepens and extends what we mean by learning design.

In Sensemaking, Madsbjerg unpacks what is introduced in the ear- lier book. Sensemaking focuses on culture, not individuals; thick data, not thin data; the savannah, not the zoo; creativity, not manufactur- ing; and the “North Star,” not GPS.20 In our world, for example, we might think in terms of student success, not academic silos. Mads- bjerg argues that experience design must leverage sensemaking meth- ods to understand why people believe and act the way they do within the “full complexity and beauty of the lived world.”21 In this way, de-

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sign is required to understand individuals within quite ordinary and everyday contexts of meaning (culture, thick data, and the savannah). To paraphrase Madsbjerg, unless we know what really matters to stu- dents and educators, we can’t understand what they need to be effec- tive. Sensemaking is an approach to new ideas that is constructed carefully (but with pace) from specific experiences to more general insights, and in a fashion committed to following paths “filled with twists and turns, dead ends, and unexpected breakthroughs.”22 These messier forms of creativity are possible and powerful if guided by what Madsbjerg calls a north star, or a strong sense of purpose that aligns the work with direction and, we would add, passion.

Let’s be clear here. The notion of learning experience design we are offering is beyond any technocratic notion of designing instruction or interfaces in an online platform. Such work is important, of course, but the design approach imagined here, while participatory and grounded in human experience, requires expertise (and people) that universities may not have or have organized in a way to engage in this work. Such design work is difficult and likely impossible for faculty to do on their own because they lack all of the necessary expertise. And they certainly lack time. Deep experience design requires an organi- zation committed to design as a normal, if disruptive, way for higher education to function.

The “experience” is the key focus for learning design in higher edu- cation for three reasons:

1. It focuses our attention on key contextual issues that impact how students learn and how educators teach.

2. It focuses our attention on people in all of their subjective experiences.

3. It enables us to apply learning design to the entirety of the university’s curricular, cocurricular, and extracurricular operations.

In the next section, we walk through an example of what this looks like, helping the university to think of student transitions as an ex- perience.

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Experiences of Interest Are beyond the Course and Classroom

A bundle of learning experiences happen in the time and space from when a student transitions into MSU through their first year. These experiences have a significant impact on student success and well- being. Embedded in this transitions project are courses and related formal learning experiences.

Michigan State University had the opportunity, with the College Transition Project, to create a coherent, student-focused approach to facilitating transitions that increase students’ sense of belonging, wellness, and informed decision-making about academic and student life. The ask of MSU was to authorize the design of a transitions pro- gram that would be expected to address a clear and coherent set of learning and business goals aligned with a clear understanding of the purpose of transitions programming.

More than 8,500 students began their MSU journey in Fall 2019. These students looked forward to MSU preparing them to navigate a world that is increasingly digitized, global, and complex, yet MSU did not have a common collective set of practices to support students’ tran- sitions and proactively ensure success for all individuals, particularly from the time of admission to the end of their first year. We created three research nodes—composed of students, faculty, and staff—to con- sider transitions from the students’ perspective, the faculty/research perspective, and the stakeholder/office perspective. Each node focused on core inquiry questions about major first-year milestones, common qualities related to student success, as well as policies, practices, and programs that enhanced or detracted from students’ resilience during their transition at MSU.

The inquiry team took a phenomenological approach, with a maxi- mum variation sampling methodology, to document diverse perspec- tives from individuals and units about their thoughts related to stu- dents’ transition at MSU, from the time of acceptance through the end of the first year. Teams put emphasis on first-time, full-time students.

To achieve maximum variation sampling, the project coordinators

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created three research nodes composed of students, faculty, and staff to focus on the core inquiry questions from three different lenses: (1) student voices, (2) faculty expertise and research literature, and (3) university offices and initiatives. Finally, the team formed a stew- ardship group representing units on campus to ensure feedback and insight from as many units and people as possible. Figure 1.2 repre- sents the organization of the transitions project.

As a result of this five-month inquiry, the following recommenda- tions were made for MSU to provide students with transitional expe- riences that would be future-ready, forward-looking, and focused on their needs:

1. Develop coherence around the major milestones related to student transition, with an emphasis on high-touch, just-in-time interven- tions. Our current practices are decentralized and uncoordi- nated, with an overemphasis on the start of the year. The impact on students is both overwhelming and incoherent. • Create a set of goals and outcomes associated with the first-

year transition, map the outcomes to interventions, and ensure consistency and continuity of messaging.

• Consider all engagement with students and parents as part of transition, create a sense of belonging, and identify specific messages and qualities that should be present at all engagements.

• Limit the volume of information delivered before arrival on campus and expand welcome period and orientation activi- ties into the fall semester.

Figure 1.2. Organizational Structure of the Student Transitions Project

Stewardship Committee

Leadership Team

Student Node

Research Node

Stakeholder Node

Diverse Student Constituencies

Academic Units & Content Experts

Campus Stakeholders and Professionals

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34 design for chAnge in higher educAtion

• Increase orientation and transition activity in the spring semester.

• Enhance the quality and impact of existing welcome events, as well as the equity of these events for diverse students (make convocation more meaningful, creative, and symbolic; try to create parity between students from large colleges and small colleges in terms of their welcome events; ensure that events and activities do not overlap; etc.).

• Consider ways to integrate and align messaging across in- ventions (e.g., eLearning and required seminars) into a coherent effort. For example, align communications, educa- tion, and interventions around alcohol and drugs, diversity and climate, relationship violence and sexual misconduct, wellness, student success. Perhaps run Welcome Week like a conference, with required sessions.

• Create or designate a person, unit, or office to help organize the first-year experience around a common set of goals and outcomes. Have a strategic plan for the first year, which all senior officials and stakeholders agree to implement.

2. Enhance the campus’s capacity to manage student and parent tran- sition through communication and coherence. There is a lack of strategic messaging with scaffolded support across transitions milestones. This leads to a lack of connectivity among institu- tional priorities.

3. Promote data collection and sharing and use across units. There are overlapping mandates, competition, and lack of transparency at senior levels of leadership. This creates conflicting priorities and agendas around student transitions.

For the most part, this project dwells in the cocurriculum, in advis- ing, and in a set of business operations that have experience implica- tions. The most significant challenge in the project has been that those professionals involved in transitions work don’t necessarily see them- selves as engaged in supporting student transitions. They are advisors, admissions officers, or faculty. They advise, admit, or teach. A good

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analogy is that many professionals who write for a living (think of lawyers) don’t think of themselves as “writers” or even as people who spend much of their time writing. Identity, role, and activities are a complicated mix. Furthermore, our colleagues are, quite understand- ably, focused on their own programs and efforts, believe that theirs are strong programs, and worry, again quite reasonably, that they will lose autonomy and agency if, for example, new student orientation needs to coordinate more seamlessly with courses in the first-year curriculum.

Given these complications, the work to date has yielded a set of rec- ommendations tailored to create experiences that help students de- velop a sense of belonging, and, we hope, identify with the university. The first recommendation was to create a set of goals and outcomes associated with the first-year transition, map the outcomes to inter- ventions, and ensure consistency and continuity of messaging. This is a simple backward design recommendation that also enables mes- saging to students before they come to MSU, during programs like orientation and at key moments during the first year. As most per- sons involved with programs that fall under a transitions umbrella understand, messaging is a key value and sometimes a real problem. The design process produced a recommendation to limit the volume of information delivered prior to arrival on campus and extend the welcome period and orientation activities into the fall semester. This approach to transitions also intends to change time in relation to these learning activities. The team also plans to extend orientation and transitions activity into the spring semester.

The design process also identified significant gaps in how program- ming met the needs of students, particularly those students for whom transition-related programming is most needed, such as first-gener- ation students for whom attending university is novel. The team rec- ommended enhancing the quality and impact of existing welcome events, as well as the equity of these events for diverse students, such as making our welcome convocation more meaningful, creative, and symbolic and trying to create parity between students from large and small colleges. New student orientation has changed the language used

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36 design for chAnge in higher educAtion

to name programs and how programs are designed to align with ex- plicit diversity, equity, and inclusion needs and expectations.

What we have named transitions is a space and set of experiences that would not typically be included in a learning design portfolio, but the experiences nested here are clearly learning experiences and arguably some of the most critical experiences for student wellness, well-being, and retention. Indeed, as the Horizon Report notes, “the impacts of the refreshed learning design field go beyond online learn- ing or on-campus courses. LDs are becoming involved in areas such as co-curricular projects, experiential learning initiatives, and programs for first-generation students.”23 One of the key design interventions in this effort was to understand this as one experience and not as a set of discrete programs. Another related intervention was to apply service design principles and practices to the process, a move that was expe- rienced as unusual, but not necessarily unwelcome, by participants, and did yield new insights. But if we can get this design project right— and get the people right as part of the process—then any university will be substantially different and almost certainly more effective.

A Discipline or a Profession

To close, we take up a key thread in Kim and Maloney’s book on learn- ing innovation, and that is how best to sustain the practice of learn- ing innovation in higher education. They note that while there are a number of professional organizations devoted to learning innovation and an ecosystem for sharing, there are no “associations/conferences devoted to studying these activities.”24 This means that we have little capacity to understand or sustain this activity in higher education. They argue for “chart[ing] a course that adopts some of the elements and expectations of an interdisciplinary academic field. We hope to retain those attributes that have made those practicing learning inno- vation dynamic and inclusive while also locating its work within the framework of accepted scholarship and criticism.”25

As the authors of the Horizon Report also argue, “learning design- ers, more than ever before, are being seen as leading experts in teach-

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ing and learning on their campuses. They are shifting from service/ support roles to being seen as essential collaborators on the design of learning experiences.”26 Essential to their leadership role on campus is an applied understanding of organizational structures and processes. Ranging from leadership and institutional governance to adaptation processes and strategic change management, learning experience de- signers will need to complement their (inter)disciplinary knowledge with principles of organizational studies in higher education.27 More importantly, they will need to be adept at understanding and navi- gating the power relationships among academics, administrators, and leaders in which their projects are embedded.

The argument that Kim and Maloney make for moving toward an (inter)discipline is fundamentally political, in the sense that the abil- ity to “ask difficult questions, take risks, and challenge institutional assumptions” requires status and agency.28 A more academic, disci- plinary orientation toward learning design and innovation conceiv- ably affords the protections of academic freedom, which includes pro- tections for critique. We are sympathetic to this line of reasoning and wish to build on it. Our sympathy is a function of a few related issues, including our own institutional experience with the Hub and the will- ingness of disciplinary faculty to recognize the work and the people as valuable.29

However, we are not at all sure that doubling down on traditional institutional patterns and habits is a way forward. For instance, the formation of fields, let alone new disciplines, is an exceptionally long process, one measured in lifetimes. One of us (Jeff), has spent his en- tire career in the emergent field/discipline of Rhetoric and Composi- tion. This is a field that traces its lineage back to antiquity and can trace a long history through higher education since the Middle Ages. But its contemporary existence in the United States is a function of two issues: the emergence of an interest in writing instruction corre- sponding with the rise of open admissions in the 1970s (the first PhD programs in Rhetoric and Composition started in 1980), and the mas- sive growth in communication studies after the 1950s, which slowly (and then quickly) pushed out rhetoric (speech) in favor of new cogni-

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38 design for chAnge in higher educAtion

tive studies of communication. Rhetoric and Composition therefore exists now largely in English departments, increasingly in newly cre- ated departments, and sometimes dispersed across communication studies and schools of information. Most faculty in this new field or discipline can’t yet agree on names, locations, shared commitments, and modes of making knowledge. It will take another lifetime to settle those issues. This is no way to make a disciplinary living.

Then, of course, there is the issue of how the work of innovation in higher education lines up with the values and work practices of disci- plinary research faculty. It has not been our experience that tenured or tenure track faculty have much interest in the core learning work of the institution. Indeed, some of the most spectacular failures in our “failure file” have been the result of faculty pulling back from com- mitments to learning innovation once they realize how much time and energy it takes. The opportunity cost is always research. As fac- ulty note in these situations, research intensive universities don’t value faculty spending time on teaching and learning. This is some- times truer at universities striving to be ranked as more research- intensive. Fields, disciplines, and the departmental structures that manage them are conservative. This can be a feature of university life, but with regard to our work, it is a bug.

Kim and Maloney acknowledge the pushback they’ve received to their argument for a new (inter)discipline: that it already exists (largely in the fields and disciplines collected in a college of educa- tion), that their thinking is an unwelcome intrusion in the space of centers for teaching and learning, and the issue we have raised here— that their idea simply reproduces values and ways of working that are antithetical to changing higher education.30 A new (inter)disci- pline may be required, but it may also be true that universities, if they are truly going to change, need to rethink more fundamentally how they are organized and staffed. Indeed, we think the greatest threat to learning design and innovation isn’t its lack of disciplinarity but rather that it isn’t professionalized and institutionalized in a way that enables careers.

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Career trajectories matter. Consider the remarkably truncated structure of academic career trajectories in higher education. If we look at the business side of colleges and universities, there are highly professionalized roles with clear structures for career advancement in information technology, housing, operations, and in some cases, student services. Professionals in these roles can have careers at a given institution, but they can also have careers across the sector. They have professional associations and recognized expertise. On the academic side of the institution, we have the tenure system and then a patchwork of names, roles, and quasi-systems with varying levels of contingency and value. Even in the tenure system, the roles are cookie-cutter (or experienced in that way): 40 percent of your time on this, 40 percent on that, and 20 percent over there. These are intel- lectually expansive lives (often) with high levels of autonomy (notion- ally), but with extraordinarily little flexibility. But there is a career path. One can be promoted. Twice. Yet this is more than what is possi- ble for academic professionals outside of that system.

An alternative (or complement) to disciplinarity is institutional change. This alternative isn’t much easier, but it is likely necessary for innovation work to persist as a feature of institutional life in higher education. As Kim and Maloney note, organizations like the Hub exist now largely because of a “magical provost” who creates new opportu- nities for innovation that don’t last beyond his or her tenure (this may be truer for us than makes us comfortable). The required institutional adaptation, however, may not be to make a discipline but rather to make this space a highly professionalized feature of how the organi- zation thinks.

To understand the university as an experience, to intentionally design that experience, and to take human experiences seriously as a subject requiring deep inquiry is a radical idea. Most universities have all the tools necessary to prioritize experience design and learn- ing innovation. What might not be the case is the extent to which these “tools” are purposed appropriately. LXD is our focus here, of course, because it is the keystone activity and profession for our larger

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argument. With that, we think it is important to close this section by returning to purpose and passion—to the need to design as if we give a damn.31 To suggest that our purpose must be grounded in something like giving a damn might seem obvious (of course we do!) or offensive to suggest (how dare you!). Yet universities are large and complex in- stitutions and are not immune to common human and organizational dynamics. As Madsbjerg reminds us:

A lack of care is often at the root of many of the business and organiza- tional challenges I encounter in my consulting. Over time, as manage- ment has become increasingly professionalized, you can sense a kind of nihilism or loss of meaning in the executive layers. This nihilism is strongest in large corporate cultures where management is seen as a profession in and of itself, with no strong connection to what the com- pany actually makes or does. What happens when satisfaction in work comes from managing—reorganizing, optimizing the operation, hiring new people, and making strategies—and not from producing something meaningful?32

What happens, in Madsbjerg’s experience, is that products and ser- vices fail and employees drift and lose passion for their work. Univer- sities are not immune. It is easy for educators of all kinds, and for those who lead and manage them, to get captured by routines, assume a shared purpose, and therefore lose track of why universities exist. It is also easy to think about learning experience design only in terms of courses and technologies. It is easy to lose track of our value because it is easy to think that we are in the idea creation and delivery busi- ness and not in the experience business. We can, therefore, forget about people and how they experience our universities.

People—students, families, community partners, staff, and faculty— are key to our existence and success. Indeed, it puts the totality of what it means to experience Michigan State University (in our case) on the table, and it puts human beings, particularly those most vul- nerable or at risk, at the center of our work. To focus on the experience changes everything about what it means to design for higher educa- tion, from the class, to the program, to the culture—and everything

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in between. This is why higher education needs LXD and needs the expertise of learning experience designers to lead these changes. In chapter 2, we describe how to operationalize LXD to translate aspira- tional changes into practical, actionable steps.

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