Unfinished by Design: A Forward Thinking Approach for Creating Adaptive, Flexible Media for fhe Ever-Changing Educational Landscape

INTRODUCTION

Many universities and colleges partner with faculty in the co-development of new online courses with the intention that the course will be taught for many years to come. Building an online course for the first time demands an upfront investment in human resources, technologies, and time. With a strong focus on the launch of course, plans for future development are seen as secondary to the immediate goal of delivering a completed online course.

Institutions of higher learning are faced with increased pressure to design adaptive media, leverage learning analytics, and build in responsive assessments into their online courses. This is compounded with the need to refresh course content based on current events and regulatory changes required for professional courses. As a result, online course design becomes a never ending task. Unfortunately, the deprecated “faculty-centered” approach of “design, build, and launch” falls short in responding to these pressures and needs.

Online courses that rely on a large amount of video content, developed in specialized systems such as Articulate, or built by an Online Program Manager (OPM) are particularly at risk for becoming quickly outdated. Without sufficient resources, processes, or expertise to update these materials, online courses quickly show their age.

As course designers, we see this as challenge which can be turned into an opportunity.

CONTEXT AND CHALLENGE

The W.R. Berkley Innovation Labs at NYU Stern partners with faculty on the design of online educational experiences together with an in-house broadcast studio, and an Online Program Provider.  It can take upwards of six months to design and produce an online course. Our online courses favor video content to deliver short mini-lectures, showcase problem solving techniques, and present expert voices. Each course is designed as a series of lessons with activities and interactive assessments.

The ever changing technological and higher education regulatory landscape necessitates an ongoing online course revision process. For example, older course materials do not collect the most up to date learning analytics or meet the most recent institutional accessibility standards. Furthermore, courses focused on real-world examples may require changes to content even before the course is launched. There are five areas that prompt updates to an online course:

1) Accessibility standards. Our focus is on iterative designs, which take into account not only new accessibility standards, but new technology and focus on emerging accessible design strategies. An  iterative approach to accessibility design creates opportunity for reworking content based on feedback and audits. While accessible content is part of the course design process, older versions of Learning Management Systems used in the past to implement learning designs may not have supported adaptive media. Conversely, updated systems may not be backwards compatible. With a national focus on global accessibility, more research findings, tools, and strategies are available, there is an opportunity to deliver online courses which meet the unique needs of individual learners who might otherwise be prevented from accessing online learning.

2) Learning analytics. Learning analytics is a relatively new area of focus for online courses. Whether creating a new course or revising an existing one, a design that incorporates a responsive approach to using learning analytics can provide information to inform future course designs. Specifically, using analytics to address questions about the effectiveness of the curriculum includes identifying the types of data that should be collected and how that data will be used. Learning Management Systems may not capture relevant analytics when content is not designed for this purpose. Online courses are now planned with analytics in mind, but retrofitting analytics to pre-designed content often involves re-sequencing content, building in points for interaction, and creating an interface for interpreting the data and results.

3) Authentic content. Using real world examples in a business school and other professional fields is key to connecting the classroom to the world. However, as events change, so does the online course. For example, in an online Accounting course, the designers encountered an event that made this need apparent. An example that was used throughout the course was based on Whole Foods Markets. At the beginning of the design schedule, it was a stand-alone company. By the time the course launched, Whole Foods had been sold to Amazon, a major event in the company’s history. However, this was not captured by the video content already developed for the online course. Building in flexibility for revision is imperative to using relevant and up to date content.

4) Real world practices. Many courses teach the application of professional standards for specific fields such as accounting or finance. Changing legal requirements and professional standards drive the need for content revisions in these courses. For example, when designing an Accounting course, a new international accounting formula was to take effect at an undetermined date. The course was launched with plans for a timely revision to adapt the content to the new accounting standard.

5) Technology. Technological change is a force that dictates frequent content and design revisions. Ensuring cross platform and mobile compatibility needs requires ongoing testing of platforms, updates to style sheets (CSS), and changes in the presentation of content. Moreover, new solutions for testing, quizzing, and interactive design are readily adopted from third-party providers. For example any of our online courses, use interactive in-video quizzing based on a new third-party innovative solution. However, the in-video quizzing company we were using was acquired by another company. The tool we were using faced a short deprecation schedule and left many our courses without the in-video quizzes and prompts that were carefully planned and implemented. New solutions must be researched, tested, and deployed.

With online courses already built and new ones underway, updating courses to meet the latest standards and apply the latest research findings to inform teaching practices can fall by the wayside. Changing a pre-built online course can be an onerous task for faculty and course designers.

To address this challenge the Learning Science Team engage their faculty in an ongoing process of course design using a Unfinished by Design Methodology. This “unfinished” (Lunenfeld, 1999) approach begins with the assumption that an online course is an evolving entity, rather than a static product that is built. In this talk, we will showcase our tactics and strategies for engaging faculty in this methodology for online course design.

RESULTS

We learned that by having a course process that builds in the tenets of good educational design informed by learning science and includes an iterative design process yields courses with a longer shelf-life and higher engagement by faculty. While a static course reflects poorly on the faculty, school, and institution at large, it is a non-trivial task to persuade stakeholders to allocate additional resources to facilitate ongoing course design. Therefore, implementing this approach required reworking the traditional online course design process to build in flexibility for ongoing revisions, an expectation set at the beginning of the initial course design phase.

We will present the Unfinished by Design Methodology for online courses — illustrated by four compelling use cases. Each use case will showcase the need for continuous iteration and redesign based on 1) adaptive media and accessibility standards 2) responsive learning analytics 3) authentic content 4) real world practices, and 5) technological change. The use cases will demonstrate strategies for creating a design process that is iterative in video and multimedia content, course lesson and text content, and assessment and interactive materials.

These strategies include:

1. Develop a system for identifying content that will or should change.
   Flagging course content that is time-sensitive, a current event, or a topic that could potentially need updating in advance. When appropriate, schedule out review dates, video re-shoots, and allocate the appropriate time and resources for content updates. When designing a flexible course, this is a crucial first step to documenting and implementing course revisions.
    

2. Use simple graphics and animations for the first version of video content.
   As part of our production process the expectation is that the graphics will evolve. Therefore, scalable and simplistic graphics require less labor and while still emphasizing the application of the key principles of multimedia learning design (Mayer, 2014). In cases when graphic content will certainly change to reflect a current event or new government standard, these are noted in the video editing log for easy image swapping of the original video file.
    

3. Keep video presentations and demonstrations short.
   The video production process is made more efficient with more, shorter videos. Updates to a short video are generally trivial over a longer video that may require extensive editing. Outdated videos can also be omitted from the course as needed.
    

4. Minimize the videos with the instructor on screen.
   Focus on creating video content that do not require the instructor to be on camera. For example, when possible, creating screencast videos or Web-based, text-based tutorials. Screencast videos and web-based tutorials can be easily updated by changing text.
    

5. Build accessibility into the resource and media design.
   Regularly target new assets for accessibility. When planning the course, identify create resources that can be easily updated to be accessible, like PDFs or Word documents.
    

6. Selectively use third party tools.
   With the torrent of educational technology startups there is a breadth of third-party technologies available on the market. Relying on third party tools to support learners experiences creates an area of risk. If a third party tool is necessary for an activity, or for trying to create a new experience, be mindful about not creating an entire portion of the course while relying on that tool. Consider a low-tech approach as a backup plan to reduce risk.
    

7. Design to capture analytics with purpose.
   Judiciously select specific lessons, media, activities, and assessments in which analytics with inform the learning design or provide insights to student progress. Ensure learning analytics are shared regularly with the instructor. Regularly analyze whether data collect adds value and when it does not. When appropriate, use the data collected as inputs to inform the next iteration of the course.

Institutions with budget and resource constraints can take advantage of these strategies to produce flexible online courses.

FUTURE IMPLICATIONS AND FURTHER STUDY

The Unfinished by Design Methodology for course design can change how the institutions view the online course design process, their allocation of resources, compensation of faculty, and enable better negotiating terms for long term contracts with OPMs.

REFERENCES

Lunenfeld, P. (1999). The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Mayer, R. (2014). Introduction to Multimedia Learning. In R. Mayer (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning (Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology, pp. 1-24). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139547369.002