 The community newsletter for VA’s Customer Experience Institute
May–June 2024
The Guide on the Side
When we create curriculum for VACXi, we step down from the podium and let our learners teach us.
Each year, VACXi brings customer experience (CX) and human-centered design (HCD) concepts to life for hundreds of VA employees who join our courses and programs. To make sure we’re creating effective learning experiences, we design and test them with the experts whose feedback we need most: our own participants.
Traditionally, instructional designers create new curriculum using the ADDIE framework, which stands for Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation. At VACXi, we use this approach too, but we add a dash of HCD.
While ADDIE encourages thoughtful instructional design, HCD multiplies its effect by adding empathy – engaging potential learners in the design process to understand their real needs. This helps create a personalized learning experience that we might not reach with a traditional design process.
In the earliest stages of designing our CX Essentials for Leaders (CXEL) program for VBA employees, we engaged a board of advisors, many of whom eventually joined the course. We were able to deliver a program in the in-person format they preferred, plus other personal touches. In the classroom, participants engaged fully because they’d felt heard the whole way through.
Because we design in collaboration with learners, our instructors can also act as facilitators, guiding learners through their own journeys and unlocking talents they already have.
“In education, there’s a saying: Do you want to be the sage on the stage, or the guide on the side?” says Amy Jones, VACXi’s curriculum lead.
“We’re not spouting all this information [to our participants],” Amy says. “We know them well enough by the time we get in the classroom to be able to guide them through this thing.”
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