Our Journey to Reinvent Our Course Development Process

Abstract: 

The audience will learn what it takes to implement course development process improvement. We will share strategies and best practices to overcome barriers to our reinvention. We will showcase various technologies that we have utilized on this journey. A goody bag of relevant resources will be available to the audience!

Extended Abstract: 

Learning Objectives

  • Describe the value and importance of continuous change
  • Describe strategies to plan a process improvement initiative
  • Discuss resources, tools, and technologies that could be relevant and reusable
  • Share best practices and challenges involved in our journey

Importance of Reinvention

“Your job as you know it and your business as it is currently run will eventually change. The only chance any of us have for prosperity is to constantly reimagine, rethink, and reinvent everything we do and how we do it in order to remain relevant. We must all become reinventors, and we’d better do it quickly.” (Jason Jennings, a researcher and the bestselling author of The Reinventors)

We will begin with identifying the importance and necessity of constant radical change in your processes, tools, and techniques. It is also very important that any reinvention or change should begin with careful thinking and a defined goal in mind. We will present our goals and the methodology that we have established as our first step in the process reinvention journey.

Our Implementation Plan

We discovered some pain points in our current course development process that were opportunities for us to reinvent. A few of them are listed as follows.

  • Our one-size-fits-all process wasn’t working to meet various needs from our clients.
  • Our tracking and reporting techniques were not very transparent and cutting edge.
  • Our course development tools were lacking robust collaborations between all the team members.
  • We had multiple systems that everyone was using to meet various needs, such as time tracking, project management of course development, workflow management, progress reporting, and resource management for various projects and courses.

As a result, we began this initiative with the purpose of redesigning our course development process to ensure efficient and timely completion through a more fluid, responsive process. We will describe an implementation plan and identify best practices and challenges involved in implementing our process improvement initiative.

Our Reinventions

After a thorough evaluation of our current systems and processes, we determined two primary paths to focus our reinvention.

  1. To reinvent the course development process itself
  2. To reinvent our toolset

The presentation will showcase resources (i.e., templates, survey questionnaires, evaluation criteria, etc.) that our team developed to equip us throughout the journey. We will also demonstrate our existing technologies that we made some significant improvements to as well as some new tools that we explored and implemented as a result. Reflections from various colleagues who got involved in this initiative as well as our findings along with real data will be shared during the presentation. There will be a virtual goody bag for all participants to view following the presentation.

Conference Track: 
Challenging Barriers to Innovation
Session Type: 
Education Session
Intended Audience: 
Administrators
Design Thinkers
Instructional Support
Training Professionals
Technologists
Other