Empathy Mapping: Bridging cultural and linguistic divides in international online education

Breakout Room E

The concept of empathy, commonly used in user experience (UX) design, has gained traction in distance education communities (Matthews et al., 2017). Empathy offers designers insight into users and their contexts (Neubauer et al., 2017) and helps designers “understand how instruction would be experienced” (Parrish, 2006), thus improving the overall outcome (Lewis & Contrino, 2016; Neubauer et al., 2017; Parrish, 2006). UX designers use a visualization tool called empathy mapping to chart information about their users. Empathy maps are used at the outset of a project and continue to evolve and inform the project as new data emerges. This paper reviews literature from the fields of instructional design, distance education, and user experience design to describe the problems in current distant education design practices; to argue for the practice of empathy in distance education design; and finally, to describe empathy mapping and how it can sensitize instructors to students’ circumstances, remove instructor bias, and help instructors make evidence-based decisions in the design and delivery of their courses.