Online course development at many institutions is stuck in the old paradigm of “putting my on-campus course online,” often resulting in courses that vary widely in quality and consistency. At one institution, this culture is being transformed through a series of incremental instructional design innovations and by piggybacking on major institutional change initiatives. The result is that new courses are being developed initially online and then adapted for face-to-face and blended/hybrid delivery. The new paradigm is “put my online course on campus.” We will identify incremental steps used to facilitate change, such as establishing standards and evaluation controls, empowering instructional designers, using a database to manage instructional design projects, and developing a multilayer approach to course development maps. We will also identify major change initiatives at your institutions that can be used as opportunities to introduce desired innovations.
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This presentation will review a successful effort to dramatically increase the quality of online and hybrid courses at North Iowa Area Community College. The CampusWorks academic services team collaborated with NIACC faculty and staff in strategic technology planning, instructional technology acquisition, LMS implementation, classroom design, instructional design, and faculty development. CampusWorks instructional designers teamed with NIACC faculty developers to create 38 online, hybrid, accelerated, competency-based, and faculty development courses. The project employed an open, cross-functional, team-based approach to align an institutionally tailored instructional design model and process, a course development life cycle, a quality checklist, an LMS course design template, an integrated faculty development program, and a Quality Matters review process.
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The power of big data is being leveraged across higher education to make predictions on student success in a course, to allow students to get to degree completion more quickly, and even to measure student sentiment within discussion forums. The term learning analytics is broadly applied to the use of data in this fashion. However, the question, “Is the student meeting the learning outcomes?” is a more difficult question to unpack given the complexities of the data needed. Higher education has an opportunity to richly define learning analytics moving forward, potentially answering the following questions. 1) How do we leverage data to provide students with access to improve their own paths to successful degree completion, while still allowing them the encounter meaningful, but potentially unplanned, learning experiences? 2) How can student demographic and performance data be tied to instructional materials to provide learners with the most effective learning objects? 3) How can instructional designers leverage learning data to influence iterations on course design?Higher education has an opportunity to define learning analytics beyond the number of clicks in the LMS. While this is one behavior that can impact student performance in a course, it is not a true measure of student learning. The future is ours to define, how will instructional designers empower this discussion?
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It is an exciting and dynamic time for professionals in the role of supporting teaching and learning. Professional practices with roots in the systems model of instructional design have taken on new qualifications that go beyond instructional design. We now hear of titles such as learning designers and educational designers. What are the similarities and differences in these roles and skills sets that support these titles, and does it matter? Where might these roles expand in their qualifications to meet new challenges such as learning analytics? Learning analytics marks a new shift in how we view the critical role of data in education. As we leverage more blended, flipped, and online course formats, we see an emphasis on using data to inform our educational design practices, to design more optimized and effective formative and summative assessments, and to increase student engagement so as to improve student outcomes. The aim of this session will be to tease out the similarities and differences in these roles and skill sets as well as look ahead to broaden the skill set to meet new shifts in our design processes to include the role of data and analytics.
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Instructional design is a maturing field with decades of practice and research to inform it. Many long-standing practices remain valuable, but new and emerging developments in education and technology have significant implications for how we think about learning experience design. What are the implications of big data and learning analytics? What happens when we blend user-centered design and traditional notions of instructional design? How is gamification and game-based learning changing instructional design? What about the role of adaptive and personalized learning? How is the commitment to such learning environments shaping or reshaping instructional design? How does virtual and augmented reality create new affordances and limitations for instructional design? How do partnerships and integrations across organizations and networks impact the instructional design process? In this session, participants will be challenged to consider the implications of these and related questions as we seek to face the challenges and embrace the opportunities of higher education instructional design in a connected age.
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Phishing and cybersecurity programs are often top-down initiatives in the corporate setting. In higher education, implementing cybersecurity programs requires a collaborative approach with departments and multiple diverse stakeholders. This session will highlight Indiana University’s journey from an initial pilot to a vended product implementation, set against the backdrop of real-world attacks. We will highlight how to leverage the educational and collaborative culture in higher ed in order to effectively implement antiphishing cyberawareness programs.OUTCOMES: Create a plan for implementing a phishing education program at your institution by leveraging past cybersecurity incidents to create buy-in among relevant stakeholders for a phishing education program and develop a blueprint for how phishing education fits into a suite of user-focused cybersecurity offerings (two factor authentication, digital certificates, etc.)
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The one certainty in IT is change. As the IT landscape shifts around us, our communication strategies need to evolve. This session will dive into two case studies and discuss how communicating IT service changes must be flexible to keep up with ever-changing technology. After developing a comprehensive, “outside the box” communications strategy at the University at Buffalo, we saw our customer base for Box cloud storage rise from under 5,000 customers to over 19,000 in two months. At UW-Madison, we recently completed our migration to Office 365, quickly realizing that traditional support and communication strategies would not keep pace with the rapid rate of change in the cloud environment. We shifted our support and communication strategy, challenging the norms of IT service delivery on campus in the process.OUTCOMES: Explore customer needs and ideas for migration strategies before migrating to a new cloud service while being able to articulate to campus leadership through an effective, multitier communications strategy some of the challenges they may face operating in a cloud environment
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In order for universities to be successful in changing environments, it is necessary to continuously develop professional skills that benefit both the employee and the campus community. The User Services department within the UW-Madison Division of Information Technology has successfully connected organizational needs with staff development through a comprehensive professional development planning process. The professional development plan helps individuals focus their action plans on the core competencies valued by the organization. This process also connects employees, particularly emerging leaders, to opportunities that reinforce effective teamwork, collaboration and communication, relationship management, and innovation.OUTCOMES: Collaboratively design a professional development plan template that focuses on organizational core competencies and strategies for facilitating employee growth and the professional development planning process with staff
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Improving student success is an ongoing topic at many institutions, but what about the onus put on students to improve their chances for success? What tools can we give students to empower them with their own data? This session will highlight use cases of a study tracker being piloted in courses at Purdue University. We will explore the pros and cons of the technology being used and considerations for helping students use their own data to help themselves. The takeaways will include lessons learned from the pilots, as well as implementation strategies for institutions looking to try something similar.OUTCOMES: Determine what types of data would be useful for students to empower them to make decisions about their own success, strategize ways to engage students in tracking and analyzing their study habits to improve their success, and formulate a plan for implementing a student study tracker pilot at your institution
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Building a community of practice assumes the creation of a safe, comfortable environment for collective learning. We will explore how you can help your group reflect on gender imbalances in the workplace. In this interactive session, we’ll examine some common interactions and find solutions that will help us all be more effective leaders in the educational technology workplace.OUTCOMES: Analyze your team’s behavior, determine strategies for improving your team’s practices, assemble a list of 5 things you can do to ensure that you and other women are promoted through skill development and networking, and demonstrate a leadership strategy that you learned in the activity
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