A group-based approach to online course design
Guest post by Kate Mitchell, University of Melbourne
A key part of my role as a learning designer (LD) in Higher Education involves helping faculty/teaching staff to redesign their courses for blended or online modes of delivery while also improving course quality. It can be a lengthy and labour-intensive process, typically involving me and others (e.g. additional LD(s), faculty developer, educational technologist) working with an individual faculty member over several weeks or months. Such a process raises questions around:
- Scalability and sustainability — LD workload/support is prioritised to individual courses, minimising ability to service the widest number of teaching staff.
- Consistency and uplift — Working 1–1 arguably leads to ‘pockets of innovation’ rather than a more consistent uplift ‘rising all tides’.
Last year, I was able to work as part of an LD team to support a team of teaching staff across courses from a single discipline in a group-based approach. This was primarily out of necessity — our team did not have the availability or resourcing to offer the ‘standard’ individualised support. However, there are a number of potential benefits to taking a group-based approach to course design and professional development (PD) that it should be considered more widely.
The approach
The approach involved two rounds of design intervention projects, each running for around 6 months.
- Round 1: LDs closely support staff across 8 courses. Traditional approach for analysis and mapping phase with 1–1 meetings, with support staff shadowing. LDs prototyped early weeks, then handover to faculty and support staff to continue the build. LDs ran group-based PD workshops on targeted topics based on identified needs as they emerged.
- Round 2: LD ‘hands off’ approach. Faculty support staff driving most interactions and responsible for LMS build. LDs in supervisory and consultative capacity only — involvement primarily kept to reviewing early design structure/mapping and providing advice to support staff.
Lessons learned
There were pros and cons to this approach, alongside a number of dependencies I would argue are needed if implementing successfully with other disciplines.
Scalability
Working across a ‘cluster’ of courses from one discipline allowed us as LDs to streamline our training to a workshop-based format, while still being agile to discipline needs and delivering in a just in time manner. We were able develop more consistent course designs as we could look for instructional design frameworks that might support multiple courses, and leverage LMS templates to build consistency and continuity, then tailor the templates for discipline-specific contexts. Templates became particularly important in the 2nd round of course designs, when support staff were taking on almost all of the LMS build, or when time-poor teaching staff were responsible for updating and building modules.
Sharing practice
We set up Microsoft Teams to facilitate regular communication both within and across course teams, both to manage work and hoping to encourage sharing practice. This worked to varying degrees depending on staff confidence and engagement. While sharing did not occur across groups as intended, Teams provided confidential avenues for support staff to raise challenges and gain advice from our team, and for us to have some visibility of progress. We were, however, able to share outputs from the first round as examples to show faculty in the 2nd round. An issue when developing online courses is having examples that are discipline specific. These examples acted as conversational starters, practical use cases and helped build trust and confidence.
Clear leadership and accountability
Faculty leadership were highly engaged — shaping a vision and strategy, being a clear escalation pathway for issues, while still allowing autonomy for teaching staff in how they designed their subjects and progressed toward meeting the strategy. A lack of clear leadership would likely hinder the success of this type of approach.
Support staff
While arguably this approach could work without support staff, a key barrier to teachers’ technology adoption and sustained use is time. Support staff were highly engaged and assisted to lighten workload for faculty course coordinators. In the 2nd round, they took on more of a learning design role alongside building and administration. Key challenges were a lack of clarity for support staff roles and scope, and a lack of adequate training and support — particularly for their taking on increased LD type duties. This led to support staff frustration/confusion and being underutilised or potentially exploited at times.
Next steps
We are about to embark on a new round 3 with the same discipline area, which is a chance to try some sustainable DIY models in training staff to take a learning design process themselves — using a similar approach as the ABC Learning Design Trello board used by Western University. I would like to try further collaborative partnership models, for more peer-peer learning and Communities of Practice (CoPs) (Wenger, 2014). CoPs have a long history in educational research and may support deeper development of practice and maintaining institutional knowledge across a faculty. Flexible models such as MOOCs or practical PD workshops such as design working bees are other options that have potential merit and could be explored as more sustainable models in faculty PD.
Kate Mitchell is a learning designer in Higher Education, supporting staff to shift their practice to blended and online learning delivery and to implement large-scale educational technology and curriculum change projects. She has been working in education in various contexts for two decades, with previous experience in secondary and vocational education teaching and media production for educational projects. Kate is an FAITD Fellow, a founding member of the ASCILITE TELedvisors Special Interest Group and a member of the ePortfolios Australia organising committee. You can learn more about her work here or follow her on Twitter at @katevideo.
This post is part of the “Around the world” series on faculty development. Watch this space in the coming months for more inspiration on professional development approaches in Higher Education from around the globe.