Pioneered by MIT, Harvard, and Carnegie Mellon, the role of the learning engineer came to Northwestern in 2016, but with our own spin. We currently have two learning engineers at Northwestern. Both are housed in Information Technology, with one of us assigned on a broad university level as a project-based learning engineer and the other embedded in the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. We plan to expand, and currently have a second embedded position posted. This one is for the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law that is starting a new online program. Eventually we hope to have learning engineers in many of our schools, expanding beyond online to in-person and blended programs. In fact, one of our learning engineers is now beginning to expand their role beyond the online program and take on more broad initiatives in all of the school's programs.
At Northwestern, the learning engineer’s role is an extension of our instructional design role. Instructional designers often use templates and checklists to help faculty translate on-ground classes to online norms, then build those courses in learning management systems. Building and expanding on this, learning engineers are not limited to only helping faculty translate in-person classes into online classes. Learning engineers create deep partnerships with faculty, each considered an expert in the science of their field. This gives learning engineers the ability to break the mold of just designing a course, expanding into longer-term projects, iterative design opportunities, and innovation. The position is a professional one, giving individuals with extensive background in educational pedagogy and experience as an instructional designer the ability to create a career trajectory.
Here are a few examples of the types of projects learning engineers at Northwestern have worked on:
Course development in IMC online program: This entails working with new faculty who have never taught online by teaching them the technology needed as well as consulting on teaching online: the best practices related to synchronous sessions, writing discussion questions that maximize the learning, and other topics like grading and student interaction.
Major teaching and learning projects: This involves consulting with faculty on the design, development, and production of large-scale, University funded initiatives. These have included MOOC development, educational technology creation and implementation, and multi-course sequence reimagining.
Founding and facilitating faculty and staff learning communities: We launched and currently lead the Educational Technology Teaching Fellows and the Learning Designer Community.
With the emergence of this role, there is now a career step beyond the role of instructional designer at Northwestern. If we want people to stay in this field and make learning design a career, we need to develop these types of positions and promote them across the higher education landscape.
In this session, we will discuss why Northwestern decided to create learning engineer positions, where we are now, and how we see this role in the future, both at Northwestern and beyond. To make our session interactive, we will create an informal self-diagnostic tool for individuals who currently serve as instructional designers to see if the work they do fits the criteria of learning engineer. We will also provide talking points for individuals who are interested in promoting the role at their institution, as well as lessons learned and tips for success in the creation, promotion, and expansion of these roles.
