Buell Research

UX Research Portfolio of Dr. James Buell

Educational project manager | User experience researcher

ESL specialist | Teacher

------

Northwestern University | U. Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Greater Chicago schools

Experiences in academic research and teaching have given me some opportunities to develop instructional design and UX skills. Here are brief descriptions of four projects I've led, in areas of online courseware, research dataset interfaces, and website design.

EvidenceBase Research Dataset

EvidenceBase is a relational database system and navigation interface that helps educational researchers to explore and analyze many thousands of text and rich-media data sources. These include hundreds of survey response sets and hundreds of hours of video, all gathered from nearly 300 students and more than a dozen teachers during a four-year-long, school-wide longitudinal investigation of innovative curricular practices.

EvidenceBase supports qualitative and quantitative research. This work illustrates how independent development, close collaboration with team members, and thorough familiarity with content can fuel successful development of an innovative tool for educational research.

BeeSpace Educator Online Workshop

BeeSpace Educator is a video-rich curricular resource for high school and college students that teaches about honeybee genomic biology, using materials that were originally presented at a weeklong educational summer camp. BeeSpace Educator combines video presentations, slide decks, presentation transcripts, background information, still image galleries, and a study guide, into an easy-to-navigate system.

I developed BeeSpace Educator for three key purposes. First, to provide a rich record for the project’s archives about the whats, hows, and whys of the outreach camp, capable of providing direction for future scientific projects. Second, to document the participants’ own teaching and learning for analysis in the dissertation. And finally, to deliver a free-standing curriculum that interested students could access and learn from anywhere, anytime.

BERAP Case Study Tool

Research about how people learn can become very complex, very quickly. In part, that’s because just about everything a researcher wants to know about comes embedded in real-world contexts. Students aren’t just grades and test scores – they bring personal, social, and cultural histories to their studying. Their ways of learning relate not only to individual capabilities, but to their interests and attitudes. They don’t learn only by themselves, but in classrooms, with particular teachers and classmates. Those classrooms and teachers are located in particular schools and communities, with particular kinds and levels of social support, and so on.

I built the BeeSpace Education Research Analysis Platform (BERAP) as a tool for managing data about teaching and learning, and for developing research understandings from the dataset. BERAP took shape from 2005 to 2008 and offered crucial support for a study of learning that became both a key output of a multi-year, multi-million-dollar scientific research project, and the focus of my doctoral thesis research.

WRFU-FM Radio Station Website

WRFU.net is a prototype website for a nonprofit community radio station in east central Illinois that offers live audio streaming, details about individual shows, and mp3 archives of past broadcasts. WRFU.net accomplishes this by using standard HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and custom audio plugins, within a content-managed site template.

As volunteer-led efforts, the website and radio station have a history that is rich in innovation but is sometimes punctuated by changes in focus and direction of energies. In mid-2017, this had resulted in 1990s-looking website that was not living up to the station's potential. I contacted the station manager and technical lead in late spring and volunteered to lend a hand, and they happily accepted. This is the story of our collaboration.

Google Sites

Report abuse