Leading from the Organizational Middle to Inspire Change and Growth in Online Distance Programs

Our work is always situated within a larger context.  And when pieces of the larger context are not working correctly, that impacts the good work happening within our own area of responsibility.  As systems thinkers, instructional designers (IDs) have a role to play in impacting and changing the larger context.  

Within the course development process, instructional designers are often hamstrung by poor working processes before and after the course development phase. Programs, courses, and faculty subject matter experts are selected for online course development to meet strategic university goals, but the readiness of programs, courses, or faculty is often not taken into account when establishing development cohorts. This frequently results in confused and delayed projects that do not meet the team or university’s established goals. 

In 2019, an online course development team within a Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) at a large university was tasked with increasing capacity for online course development projects in order to support the strategic mission of increasing online student enrollment. The primary objective of the Course Development Team is to assist faculty in the creation and revision of online and blended courses within a structured course development process that spans multiple cross-functional teams, units, and departments within a larger parent unit. To support this mission, the team was restructured under new leadership and provided three new instructional designer positions.

Historically, the course development process had been successful, but that success was often in spite of upstream and downstream processes. For projects to be successful, it required the instructional designers to take responsibility for many aspects of the process that were out of the scope of the ID’s original assigned goals. When tasked with increasing the number of course projects each semester, it was clear that the team needed more than new positions. It also needed a dedicated initiative to improve processes both internally and across units to solve these challenges. 

In the spirit of allowing those “closest to the work” to guide new policy and decisions, the team began the work of: 

• Changing and updating internal course development processes and procedures

• Developing a shared vision around quality standards and expectations

• Agreeing to accessibility standards and expectations

• Changing course readiness assessments

• Establishing new intake procedures

• Creating new communication channels with department chairs

• Creating new onboarding materials

• Tracking work at all levels to contribute to data-driven decisions

These changes and solutions went a long way to addressing the common issues with course development including promoting faculty readiness, establishing expectations of a course development process, and promoting clear discussion around the actual capacity and workload required for projects. 

While these changes have made a big difference to the success of the Course Development Team and experience of the designers on the team, these changes are central only to the course development phase and do not necessarily address those processes and procedures that course projects are influenced by upstream and downstream of the course development process. 

The bigger organizational changes both within the Course Development Team and in the teams that managed before and after development processes resulted in some confusion around roles, workload, and a push-back against more work. While IDs by nature are creative, quick to be effective, natural systems thinkers, and frequently embrace change when the reasons for change are to improve working processes and results, non-IDs are sometimes not as agile or quick moving.

In an effort to address this, the Course Development Team and its leadership dedicated itself to sharing instructional design and system thinking support for other teams upstream and downstream of the course development process, even when those teams and partner units were not under the Course Development Team’s formal leadership. 

The team entered into a kind of informal mentoring with the understanding that partner units cannot, or are unable, to see the system or larger context in which their work is situated. Because of ID’s strengths as systems thinkers, and their role in the middle of an online course development workflow, they are uniquely situated to evaluate processes and challenges, address them, but also still account for the context and limitations of those other units. 

Beyond process improvements, the Course Development Team has embraced a mindset of growth and empowerment of faculty, departments, department chairs and partner units. One example of this model is guiding the revision of the contract used for course development projects. Rather than contracting individual faculty members for projects, the Course Development Team’s leadership encouraged and assisted in rewriting the contract so it would go to departments rather than faculty. Contracting the department rather than the faculty resulted in more departmental ownership and more chair involvement. It embeds the department chair into the course development process and allows for more strategic conversations about course projects. 

Along this same line of thinking, the Course Development Team has encouraged movement away from a customer service model where the primary goal is keeping academic departments and individuals happy to a larger focus on sustainability, growth, and fulfilling strategic university goals. Another example of this is encouraging the establishment of a “refresh model” for course development that services the university’s entire portfolio of online courses rather than a scarcity model of servicing only those courses that need to be put online in a particular semester. 

A future initiative that falls within this model of managing from the middle is supporting and championing the concept of a Chairs Academy - atypical of a campus chair development model where job orientation / task orientation is the current focus. Instead, a Chairs Academy teaches the real work of leading and driving people towards shared goals and project completion, switching the focus from operational goals to strategic ones. 

Over the past three semesters, the Course Development Team’s goal has been to embrace the tension that comes with these sorts of changes with honesty and empathy. We encourage our partner units to let go of and break existing processes that are not working with the knowledge that it will be fixed better than it was before, with our promise of support and assistance to help make things better. The Course Development Team encourages failing early and fast (agile methodology) and pushes the idea of “not letting perfection be the enemy of done.”

This presentation will share the details of these changes to the online course development process and team, the approaches and strategies implemented to ensure these changes are successful, and the strategies we have utilized around managing from the middle to provide a positive impact on partner units upstream and downstream of a course development process. 

By the end of the presentation, attendees will be able to:

• Brainstorm ways to adopt agile methodology for online distance programs within cross-functional teams

• Identify areas of opportunities for leading initiatives both upstream and downstream

• Identify areas for growth in cross-institutional teams

This presentation will include small group discussions and opportunities for questions and sharing of experiences. The presentation will also include an opportunity for open and honest sharing of how to remain motivated to push for and enact changes when you know the solution and can see problems, but don’t have the formal power to enact changes. 

Attendees will receive a copy of the presentation.