Teaching a craft

Ecole Multimedia

For 20 years, Ecole Multimédia, a private college in Paris, France, has been teaching Graphic, Web Design and Web Development to the new generation of French Web Designers, Art Directors, Project Managers, and Developers.

Always on the edge of new trends and technology, Ecole Multimédia wanted to add UX Design to the building blocks of their recognized training. After greeting me as a Jury member of the 2013 Associate Art Directors Diploma, they honored me with a full time position as an UX Design Instructor, in which I was hands-on on innovative teaching approach.

The very same year, I became a Faculty Advisor, and Program Director, which led me to act as the Head of UX at the 201 Innovative Lab, in which students applied research for innovative digital interfaces. I have led the effort in bringing the college to the 1st top rank, before the historical Gobelins Art School. Two years later, our work led the Lab to become the 204 Monochrome, a showroom dedicated to VR experiences.

I approached UX Design as an Applied Science to web design, using Cognitive Psychology, Neurosciences, and Usability to demonstrate how a same problem can be treated differently, accordingly to target, device, and usage.

I coupled this approach with a conference style, which had a huge success and a great impact, leading students to excellent grades (GPA 3.9). I used minimal yet colorful design to maximize interaction with the classroom.

I focused essentially on practical exercises, live analysis, and challenged students into problem solving, especially when it came to using the current trends. Moreover, homeworks were annotated with constructive comments and feedback to help students progress.

Moodboard & visual tonality

Keeping students interested

In his 1984’s ‘Experiential Learning’, Kolb demonstrated that learning is effective only if lesson is truncated to 15 minutes. He suggested to punctuate with varied activities that help the instructor gauge the students’ progress and require students to actively engage the content, each other and the instructor.

 

We advocated for a conference style, with the right amount of information on the screen, examples and analyses of live and recent websites, and the most discussion possible with the students.

Teaching Methods

Far away from dull Powerpoint presentations and minimal design, strong contrasts and vivid colors captures and maintains attention through 3 to 4 hours of teaching. Humor and jokes are used to keep students’ attention, break the formality, and create a more casual atmosphere. Every 2 topics, a complimentary color balances out the potential eye fatigue issue. Every slide displays essential information to engage students into a dialog.

 

A couple of patterns are in use across the slides to help instant recognition of a topic: violet and green + atom or Rorschach masks for UX methods, and Psychological theories, lime + axis and logs used for Maths, and ice blue + cog for tools and exercises, and so on…

“In less than a year, Christophe has gone from serving on the end‐of‐year jury for these second year students to being the
program director. This is all thanks to his remarkable talent. Christophe has an innate skill in simplifying the complex, technical subject matters he teaches so that they are readily accessible to his students. We have consistently received very positive feedback of his work.”

P. Neveu, Co-founder & Principal – Ecole Multimedia

Results

3.9 GPA Average, 1st ranked private school in the Figaro Etudiant