Hello everyone, my name is Shreyosi Endow and today I will be talking about my work
I m better off on my own. Understanding how a tutorial s medium affects physical skill
development. I will be presenting on behalf of my co-author Cesar Torres. This work was
developed in the Hybrid Atelier at the department of computer science and engineering at the
University of Texas at Arlington.
The shift to distanced learning caused by the pandemic has emphasized the difficulties
of physical and tacit skill transfer in remote learning scenarios. Many skills are reliant
on hands-on, in-person training, tacit skills are difficult to document, and most tutorials
do not capture the full picture of performing the task.
Researchers have worked extensively on making tutorials in legacy mediums such as video,
web and text/image mediums more effective. Significant work has been done on generating
tutorials that follow popular conventions such as the step by step convention in different
legacy mediums.
However, tutorial mediums are evolving and new mediums provide new affordances that makes
the adoption of legacy medium conventions difficult or ineffective.
The question arises as to how we can go beyond the step-by-step tutorial. This can be made
possible using a framework that leverages the affordances of new mediums to create instructional
materials rather than remediating existing tutorial conventions.
In this work, we take a step towards medium-centric tutorials. Inspired by Marshall McLuhan s
The Medium is the Message , we performed a medium analysis of tutorials that follows
the famous Ryerson experiment. The Ryerson experiment looked at the effects
of a single lecture rendered in four different mediums: visual class notes, a radio lecture,
a television recording and a live lecture. It was observed that the unique affordances
of the mediums played a big role in how the message was received by the students.
We followed a similar approach where we analyzed tutorials for centering clay rendered in text/image,
video and web mediums. We also observed the effects of the mediums on teaching novice
users how to center clay through a user study.
Centering clay is the task of adhering a ball of clay to the center of a pottery wheel.
It is the foundational step for throwing clay on a pottery wheel. We chose this task because
centering requires active and continuous attention and physical engagement of multiple parts
of the body. The task is messy and makes it difficult to integrate electronics and is
also rich in tacit knowledge. As a result, this task exemplifies the difficulty of physical
skill transfer and researchers in hci have looked at ways to communicate the tacit tasks
involved in centering clay.
From our medium analysis, we contribute a taxonomy of medium conventions, a set of themes
and design recommendations that describe continuing and alternative trajectories for designing
tutorials. The taxonomy of medium conventions is intended
to be used by designers to navigate design decisions when developing tutorials in new
mediums. The y-axis represents the level of creative sensemaking a convention illicits
while the x axis represents the major role the convention plays in tutorials.
These medium conventions help render information in a way that is cognitively easier to process,
however the amount of information they encode is unique and play a role in sensemaking efforts.
For example, compared to step by step tutorials, a bifold tutorial is easier to process but
the information is limited. As a result, it requires the user to engage in significant
sensemaking activities compared to the step by step tutorial.
The aim of these conventions is to bring higher fidelity to a user s situation to allow easier
access to information that is needed. For example, a closeup shot directs the user s
attention to a particular area to highlight its importance and relevance. Context conventions
such as scene narrative help communicate tacit information that can help users address unique
situations.
Empathy conventions promote relatability and allow the tutorial to resonate with the user
s skill level. For example, users can learn about other people s struggles and achievements
through comments. Archival conventions such as shareability support the sharing, dissemination
and access to tutorials or parts of tutorials.
To give an example of how to use our taxonomy, consider a medium that can display all the
hand motions of a person who is centering. Such would benefit from tutorials with higher
sensemaking conventions. A designer can pose the user s motion and author s motion as bifold
plates or use personalized annotations to draw attention to specific hand motions rather
than exhaustively annotating the tutorial.
We derived a set of themes, out of which I will now present two that stood out. In our
analysis, we found conventions such as the bifold plates intentionally introduce ambiguity
by selectively removing entire elements of the message. Users were encouraged to use
their intuition when following this high sensemaking tutorial and approached centering in a trial
and error fashion. As a result, they were able to come up with their own definitions
of what successful centering looked like.
We encountered instances where tutorial authors encouraged learners to center with minimum
peripheral distractions to amplify the sense of touch and facilitate a haptic conversation
with the clay. This was often achieved through conventions such as blur and focus and close-up.
Our users often relied on their haptic perception to guide their actions. One user stopped the
video tutorial and focused on the task instead. Upon asking why he stopped the tutorial, the
user said I m better off on my own. I will now be going through our design recommendations
for creating tutorials in new mediums.
This recommendation suggests that a tutorial should convey the potential actions of a task
and their boundaries of operation to encourage an open-ended construction of knowledge.
For example, new sensor-based wearable technologies are often used to give feedback regarding
correct or incorrect hand positions. An alternative constructionist learning approach would be
to communicate the bounds of pressure to apply to help the learner develop a mental model
of how clay reacts to pressure.
We found that humanizing the narrator and dissolving the illusion of the artistic genius
invites greater agency and attention to the part of the learner. This can be done by visualizing
failures and imperfections. As a grounding example, patination of user activity such
as encoding the view history of a video tutorial can inform new viewers on what to expect while
providing opportunities for the author to add personalized annotations to provide additional
context.
Tutorials themselves can distract the learner from having a reflective conversation with
the material and disrupt workflows. We recommend that tutorials attempt to foreground the material
based interactions instead. Tutorials can use blur and focus to reduce peripheral noise,
do slow-motion and closeup shots in video-based mediums. In audio-based mediums, the clay
sounds can be amplified using microphones.
We found that the difficulty to synchronize one s pace to that of a tutorial s, as well
as the inability to interact with the medium, distracts the learner from the task at hand.
Passive text/image based mediums provided the most spatio temporal control, i.e. the
tutorial only advanced when the learner desired, and addressed synchronization issues with
collages of images depicting the whole process in one page. Video mediums can enhance the
collage by providing looping mechanism to give the learner time to process and perform
the physical action shown in the tutorial.
We hope that using these design recommendations, more tutorials can be designed to be more
design centric that can leverage the affordances of the new mediums. I would like to thank
the users who participated in our study, the members of the Hybrid Atelier lab and the
anonymous reviewers for their very insightful feedback. Thank you for listening to me. I
hope you have a great day.