Google UX Design Certificate: 🚀 EdTech Cohort

Let’s learn some UX stuff and analyze the course design with an LX lens

Hey all! 👋

I recently was thinking about how this 7-course Certificate Specialization offered by Google via Coursera could be approached in multiple ways.

3 Atypical Approaches

Audit

It isn’t abundantly clear at first but you could navigate to each of the 7 courses of the overall specialization individually and click “audit” when signing up. This video at 1:27 shows a screen recording of that.

This option is not the full experience but you do get access to almost all of the learning material. You just will not get feedback on projects and quizzes/graded work and will need to get that input from elsewhere in your network.

Curriculum Guide for DIY

The course descriptions and syllabi give great overviews of the types of topics and skills you should be working on. You could use it as an outline to fill out your design education further from other sources and also assess your strengths and weaknesses.

LXD Analysis

Learning Experience Design is on display here and you could analyze beyond content to the actual design of the course. I have been so intrigued by how a UX course itself is designed for learning. Personally, I am preparing to teach a high school UX course and am all eyes on how Google/Coursera is going about this.

I thought it would be fun to get like-minded people together for a super low-level commitment, flexible cohort of sorts. This is what I am thinking:

Who?

• Anyone taking the Google UX Design specialization (auditing, partial courses, or the full experience)
• Designers and anyone interested in the education product and EdTech space
• Educators and anyone interested in the Learning Experience Design of the courses
• Newbies and veterans in the fields

When and Where?

• Figma File + Zoom Chats: 1x per month-ish live video meeting, probably in a file together too
• Slack Chats: Fridays 30 min live synchronous text chat
• Ongoing asynchronous community available for those interested
• The first course is for 4 weeks. We will probably take a week off and go from there.
• Coursera approximates 6 months for all 7 courses at a pace of 10 hours per week. Another way to look at it is by “Weeks” in each course. There are 31 in total. (More details below.)

What?

• Google and Coursera pace the course material out by weeks. For Fridays, I can simply post the week’s topic and we can riff off what stood out to us, general or specific. We can throw out questions, projects we are working on, UX critique, LX critique, etc.
• For the occasional live video chats, we can go a little deeper on some of the weekly topics and perhaps work collaboratively on something for fun/practice. And maybe some classroom show and tell.

Example Cohort Member: I watch the Slack channel on Fridays at 11am PST for some updates and thoughts on what people are thinking about in the class. I add my favorite highlight from the week into the conversation. I also throw out a problem I have been thinking through and get some interesting ideas and feedback. The following week happens to be our monthly meetup and we are going to do some collaborative play on a reoccurring theme from our Slack chats.

Why?

• It is fun to learn together! I am not positioning myself as offering coaching or teaching here. Just want to bring people together.
• Bringing together education and EdTech peeps will help us have a unique lens, discussion, and take on the course material. The Coursera community is there too and our Cohort could just be something smaller and more niche and interactive.

Commitment Level

If you think you could make it at least 50% of the time. That basically means:

• a couple of Fridays a month for the Slack chats
• live Zoom/Figma meeting at least every other month

Personally, I already can predict some weeks where I will probably not get a chance to work on the course.

We will make this an iterative process and check-in periodically between courses to see how this pace and framework is suiting us.

What if I already started the courses?

• If you already started, great! You can pop in and maybe make sure you join us on the “Weeks” where the material was especially interesting to you and you had feedback and questions.

What if I am late to this party?

• If you find this late and want to join when we are already weeks ahead of you, still request to join! Google recommends taking the courses in order, but maybe you could get started and do some of the current’s weeks work to stay in touch. Or just join the meetings and soak it up and share your experience.

What if I am already in a bootcamp, cohort, class, etc.?

• If you can meet the commitment level above and you are able to include the Google courses in your workload, join us!

Sign-ups

• Educators, LX peeps, and designers in the education and EdTech space… is that you? Click here.
• Potential start time: Open group Monday, April 5. First Slack chat on Friday, April 9.
• You will receive a welcome email by Monday, April 5th and a Slack invite.
• See below if you want an outline of what the weeks will cover.

Reach out on LinkedIn or Twitter if you have questions. I look forward to learning with you! 🤓

🍎 Course Outline by Weeks

Course 1: Foundations of User Experience (UX) Design

Week 1: Introducing user experience design

Week 2: Getting to know common terms, tools, and frameworks in UX design

Week 3: Joining design sprints

Week 4: Building a professional presence

Course Page.

Course 2: Start the UX Design Process: Empathize, Define, and Ideate

Week 1: Integrating research into the design process

Week 2: Empathizing with users and defining pain points

Week 3: Creating user stories and user journey maps

Week 4: Defining user problems

Course Page.

Course 3: Build Wireframes and Low-Fidelity Prototypes

Week 1: Storyboarding and wireframing

Week 2: Creating paper and digital wireframes

Week 3: Building low-fidelity prototypes

Course Page.

Course 4: Conduct UX Research and Test Early Concepts

Week 1: Planning UX research studies

Week 2: Conducting research with usability studies

Week 3: Analyzing and synthesizing research results

Week 4: Sharing research insights for better designs

Course Page.

Course 5: Create High-Fidelity Designs and Prototypes in Figma

Week 1: Starting to create mockups

Week 2: Applying visual design principles to mockups

Week 3: Exploring design systems

Week 4: Participating in design critique sessions

Week 5: Creating high-fidelity prototypes

Week 6: Testing and iterating on designs

Course Page.

Course 6: Responsive Web Design in Adobe XD

Week 1: Starting the UX design process: Empathize and define

Week 2: Continuing the UX design process: Ideate

Week 3: Creating wireframes for a responsive website

Week 4: Creating and testing low-fidelity prototypes

Week 5: Creating and testing high-fidelity designs

Week 6: Documenting design work and searching for jobs

Course Page.

Course 7: Design a User Experience for Social Good & Prepare for Jobs (5 Weeks)

Week 1: Starting the UX design process: empathize, define, ideate

Week 2: Creating wireframes and low-fidelity prototypes

Week 3: Creating mockups and high-fidelity prototypes

Week 4: Designing a complementary responsive website

Week 5: Finding a UX job

Course Page.

The learning never stops. Let me know if you have any awesome courses or resources to share!