Instructional design teams face increasing challenges to maintaining consistency and quality of services while being able to rapidly scale up to meet institutional goals. Learn about teamwork practices that are sustainable and design-centric. Virtual teamwork spaces we’ll explore include, Team Website, Team Sandbox, Faculty Development Portal, and Google Drive.
With the demand for online education and its associated complexity on the rise with seemingly no pause in the immediate future, instructional design teams are tasked with doing everything from building online courses to leading institution-wide initiatives. For team leaders this presents challenges in terms of knowledge transfer among new and existing members, team productivity and confidence, and overall satisfaction among the academic communities they serve. To face those challenges, teams might adapt by expanding and diversifying team structure, simplifying and streamlining team processes, or some combination in between, with the usual deciding factors being time and resources. For small teams already working to capacity and with limited resources, opportunity for growth and adaptation will most likely need to come from innovative thinking within the team itself.
In this session we’ll discuss how a small centralized instructional design team at the University of North Florida developed a community of practice on sustainable instructional design teamwork in order to provide quality core services to 500+ faculty members while also leading and collaborating on an array of institution-wide initiatives. Specifically, we’ll explore examples of strategic documentation of team knowledge and services, streamlined methods for tracking and managing projects, standards for planning and implementing individual and team-based projects, mechanisms for reporting and communicating team progress, and finally a few best practices for effective communication.
This session will start with a brief overview and discussion of our team’s instructional design services and community of practice for sustainable teamwork. Then move into live viewing of our team’s core online spaces (website, sandbox, google drive, portal) with opportunity for questions throughout. In conclusion of this session, participants should be able to apply strategies from this session to build their own community of practice on instructional design teamwork, or at the very least, walk away with some bright new ideas.