Austin Community College

Role: Associate Professor, User Experience Design
Skills: Instructional Design, Curriculum Development
The Challenge: Successfully build and launch a new degree at ACC, namely the UX Design degree, in order to bring our department’s degree offering in line with the current realm of the design industry, and so that our graduates will have the necessary skills to enter that industry.
Results: Austin Community College now has the first accredited two year Associates Degree in User Experience Design in the country.

Attempting to build and successfully launch a new degree at ACC was no small task. It required a tremendous amount of teamwork, professionalism, skill, industry collaboration, creativity, and perseverance.

So that was the journey that our team began late 2012 and into 2013 and spent the next two to three years completing.

This process began with the recruitment of industry professionals to work with our instructional design team at ACC in a workshop setting in which they looked at the existing degree compared to current industry and industry trends to help them determine which direction we needed to go with the new degree. And just as we suspected, User Experience Design won.

The next leg of the journey involved a considerable amount of research to help determine what needed to be included in this new degree, this step involved many iterations. We developed the course names and drafted course descriptions and then presented this to our Industry Advisory Committee for feedback and approval.

After the proposed new degree courses and descriptions were finalized there were a series of reviews within ACC running all the way up the chain of academia that we successfully navigated and gained the necessary approvals through so that our new degree could move forward.

We received the green light and began collaborating with other faculty, including industry adjunct faculty to develop and write the new User Experience Design degree. This process took a considerable amount of time, considering we were still teaching full-time and our adjunct were working full-time. The main charge was to complete the first round of course development in time to launch the degree when we planned. The rest of the courses were build in tandem with the launch and progression of the new degree.

As the semester for launching the new degree was approaching, we facilitated the transition from the Web and Interactive Design degree to the implementation of the new UX Design degree. We helped students determine how to complete the original degree or transition to the new degree.

Austin Community College now has the first accredited two year Associates Degree in User Experience Design in the country.