Through a variety of partnerships with other units at Purdue University – West Lafayette, instructional designers work with faculty and instructional staff to create more student-centered learning environments. Participants will learn about the partnerships and programs for instructors interested in creating online courses for support of their redesign goals.
Partnering with other units on campus, instructional designers collaborate with faculty to design courses that are student-centered. One such partnership is Instruction Matters Purdue Academic Course Transformation (IMPACT). IMPACT is a successful faculty development program centered on a Faculty Learning Community (FLC) approach. Since IMPACT’s inception in 2011, every college/school has had courses transformed. In collaboration with Digital Education (DE), a unit on the West Lafayette campus that provides a wide array of opportunities for the online environments at Purdue University, instructional designers from the Teaching and Learning Technologies (TLT) unit of Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP) collaborate to assist faculty in the development of online courses. The Course Design and Development (CDD) group of TLT also enters into Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs) with colleges/schools to provide customized services to create online courses. Through these partnerships, the online learning environments are being transformed.
Purdue University, a large R1 research university in Indiana has developed a course redesign program to transform large foundational courses from all colleges/schools across campus. IMPACT is a Purdue Provost’s initiative facilitated through the collaborative efforts of the Center of Instructional Excellence (CIE), ITaP, University Libraries, DE, and the Evaluation and Learning Resource Center (ELRC). Using research findings on sound student-centered teaching and learning practices, over 289 faculty have redesigned their courses enhancing student learning, competence, and confidence. IMPACT has transformed over 277 unique courses have been transformed during FLCs and 191 additional unique courses have been transform outside of the FLCs, being tracked as “IMPACT-influenced” courses.
During an FLC, each faculty member is assigned a “Support Team” that is made up of members from the various units. The Support Team consists of a “Primary” support team member, who acts as the main contact for the faculty member, and one or more “Secondary” support team members. All Support Team members participate with faculty in the FLC, which serves as the foundation for the faculty development phase of the program. In the actual redesign process, the Support Team members provide a variety of roles dependent upon their area of expertise, for example: pedagogy, technology, information literacy, research and many other areas. Over the past seven years the actual structure of the Support Team has taken several forms. This evolution and the pros and cons of the various structures will be discussed.
Two years ago, in 2016, Digital Education was created and an Action Plan for Digital Education (AP4DE) was created by the university community. The goals of AP4DE are:
- To develop our digital infrastructure
- To create digital education teams within the colleges
- To create a central portal for digital education
- To cultivate a university-wide digital education community
- To expand university recognition of online excellence
- To establish a “Purdue for Life” approach to lifelong learning
ITaP-TLT instructional designers have been key partners in carrying out these goals. Each semester faculty submit applications to be able to work with instructional designers and other professional staff to develop online courses. This course development process uses an informal review with the Quality Matters (QM) rubric as a guide to effective course design.
Other colleges/schools have entered into MOUs with the CDD group of TLT to utilize the expertise of the designers. For example, Krannert School of Management has developed a hybrid MBA program, partnering faculty with instructional designers to develop these hybrid courses. The College of Agriculture has also utilized the services of the instructional design group to move their online program forward. In the past three years, the instructional design group has grown from three designers to eleven and we are still growing. With the acquisition of Kaplan University and the creation of Purdue Global, the potential for additional partnerships is sure to keep instructional designer group growing.
In this collaborative session, participants will be able to share their stories about growth at their institutions. Participant will take away a plethora of ideas further grow the online learning environments at their institutions.