"In Jan 2023, I enrolled for a UXUI Design certificate program advertised by UC Berkeley (UCB) Extension Campus. Over the course of the first few weeks I realized the program was not run by credentialed teachers or established industry practitioners but rather by a cohort of Teaching Assistants without any significant UX industry experience or teacher training. When I sought to withdraw from this program, I learnt about the relationship between UC Berkeley-edX-2U. The only point of contact for certificate program students was the Student Success Manager at 2U who said since it was past the due date, I would lose my entire payment of $13,000 by withdrawing. On February 13, 2023 I made an appeal to withdraw from this program to the UCB Extension Campus. The university never acknowledged or responded to my email that detailed substandard teaching. Over the course of 24 weeks I observed the following:
- Students had no access to any software (they used free versionspurchased subscriptions on their own), collaboration tools, library access. The course slides referred to Medium blogs and free content in the public domain. It was a resource-poor educational environment
- The course of 50 adult students was led by an industry practitioner who worked at Google as a UX content designer and was also a voice artist. He had no experience in teaching, no experience in UX Research, Coding, and other parts of curriculum. He was not teaching a course but performing, leading, and entertaining by reading large slide decks prepared by 2U's instructional designers. This course lead did not supervise any student projects, perform any grading, and would not answer specific technical questions when pointedly asked.
- The everyday tasks of grading, supervising, approving project proposals, and resolving student concerns were handled by a cohort of 5-6 Teaching Assistants who had no background in teaching, no teaching credentials, many were graphic designers, visual artists, rookie coders who were themselves trying to break into the UX field as designers and developers. Unsurprisingly, several TAs were recent graduates of 2U's certificate programs focused on Front-end Coding, UXUI Design. The staffing of this certificate program was done by hiring and employing ill-equipped Teaching Assistants at a minimum wage. There was no pedagogy or sound instruction informing this course, rather there was an abundance of templates for everything from research, design, coding and most students relied on those learning aids till the very end. This course did not teach foundational concepts and technical concepts in any aspect of UX or had any rigor. The emphasis was on learning industry jargon, storytelling, and presentation skills.
- The Student Success Manager (SSM) was the only point of contact beyond the instructional team. This SSM did not have an undergraduate degree, no experience in higher education, no familiarity in norms of student confidentiality. Her background was in retail.
- Non-anonymized forced weekly survey: Each week all students were forced to respond to a weekly survey that focused on their perception of the instructional team. There was no option to opt-out of this survey and the student responses were not anonymized. The survey results were released right away to the lead instructor who occasionally addressed responses in class meetings. Students did not know how and where this data would be stored and used. I believe this was a part Other-Other Update"