Adapting to Scale: A Multifaceted Partnership Model

Presentation Description & Goals

Panelists will offer insights into the dynamic storyline of their collaborative efforts over the 2018 academic year. The goals of the panel session are to:

1. Discuss the rationale for this partnership

2. Reflect on the benefits for students, faculty, university, and beyond

3. Share implementation procedures and challenges

4. Recommend key strategies that have been developed or evolved from the initiative

The session will be moderated by Baiyun Chen, Ph.D., PAL Team Lead, Center for Distributed Learning (CDL), and the panel members for this session include publishing and EdTech executives, university administration, faculty, and the principal instructional designer for this project. The name and title of each panelist are as follows:

• Ellen Mayes, Sr. SE Regional Key Account Manager, Cengage

• Jerri Norris, Business Dev. Director, Institutional Sales, Cengage

• Frank Claffey, Chief Product Officer / Co-Founder, Realizeit

• Chafika Landers, Director, Client Engagement, Realizeit

• Thomas Cavanagh, Vice Provost, Digital Learning, UCF

• Tarek Buhagiar, Instructor, College of Business, UCF

• James R. Paradiso, PAL Instructional Designer, UCF

This is a highly interactive session: The moderator will facilitate four rounds of discussion regarding rationale, benefits, challenges, and strategies, and each participant will have access to an editable Google Doc with presentation content and resources to which they can add questions, ideas, suggestions and additional resources throughout the session. The participants will have access to these resources after the session for their personal reference.

Background

The University of Central Florida (UCF) is a metropolitan research university that includes 13 colleges and offers over 200 degree programs. Currently UCF is the largest university by enrollment in Florida and one of the largest universities in the nation with over 66,000 students with representation from all 50 states and 152 countries. UCF is strategically implementing adaptive learning to improve student success in large-enrollment gateway courses and courses that have traditionally had unacceptably high levels of D and F grades and course withdrawals (DFW); a venture, while noble, has confronted its share of obstacles.

While finding ways to scale adaptive learning at UCF is not a novel idea, making grand leaps has proven elusive. That is until a perfect storm of events unfolded that could change that narrative for years to come. This undertaking required the steadfast work of a complete range of stakeholders, from high-level publishing company and educational executives to those adept at the technical workings of Realizeit (the adaptive platform), and, finally, the expertise of a seasoned subject matter expert (SME) and instructional designer (ID). These relationships have formed a first-of-its-kind partnership at UCF that is paving the way for similar future endeavors between publisher, platform, and institution.

Use Case

The primary challenge with developing adaptive courses in Realizeit (or any content-agnostic system) is preparing the learning materials. For example, authoring a tremendous amount of content and redesigning courses using an unfamiliar platform are daunting tasks, as they not only require highly-skilled faculty/SMEs, but an enormous amount of time and resources, which can easily discourage instructors who already have a full workload.

Fortunately (in a good number of instances), faculty have the support of IDs to help with course design and delivery, as well as a wide range of publishing companies that offer exemplary content in the form of electronic textbooks, learning assessments, and platforms to house such content. Therefore, the support certainly exists, but the extent to which these entities communicate with each other is highly variable.

In the case of UCF and its contingents, a lack of continuity was evident and efforts were often being duplicated due to a lack of communication between those who had vested interests in the overall process / workflow of the course in question: While the aforementioned stakeholders were having individual conversations with each other, they were missing out an a larger opportunity to work together.

This ‘larger opportunity’ was the impetus for the multifaceted partnership model and will be the primary focus of this panel discussion.