What does your Instructional Design "shop" look like? As we move into the next 25 years of online learning, partnerships between instructional designers and subject matter experts has become critical to our ability to build and scale for greatest program growth.
This session will share some research on common issues in establishing the relationship between instructional designers and subject matter experts, show examples of the ideal instructional design team set up and have an opportunity to discuss current standings of instructional design teams for each participant.
How has your organization begun to address this issue? Are you a team of one or many? What would you like to see in the future and how can you influence your organizations leadership to see that change?
Technology enhanced learning is becoming a regular part of the university process. With declining campus enrollment, we need to turn to alternative methods of attracting student populations and we need to scale quickly and efficiently. In the presenter's current system, faculty are solely responsible and solely autonomous in the creation of course content and structure. It needs to establish quality and course creation standards. This will help to measure students success and directly address retention efforts. To create a quality online course it can take between 43 and 490 hours depending on the complexity (Chapman, 2010). Breaking this down by one hour of elearning, it can take up to 270 hours to produce (The eLearning Guild, 2002). The biggest barriers to successful instructional design collaboration stems from lack of faculty buy-in, lack of time and resources, and lack of institutional structure which supports integration of the instructional design process (Intentional Futures, 2016, & Miller & Stein, 2016). Many universities are struggling with the balance between instructional design support and faculty autonomy, but most chief online officers acknowledge that student performance and course quality are improved with instructional design support. (Garrett, Legon, & Fredericksen, 2019). Pedagogical training is not consistently mandated across state colleges and universities, often due to contract restrictions (Magda, 2019). At the same time the majority of faculty respondents in Inside Higher Ed’s 2018 Survey of Faculty Attitudes on Technology state that they are not provided enough support for online teaching and course development, but when they do work with instructional designers 93% say their experience is positive and 70% say the instructional designer improved course quality (Jaschik & Lederman, 2018). Faculty often don’t understand the role of the instructional designer and how they can partner to develop better courses (Intentional Futures, 2016), but purposeful instructional design does have a positive impact on student learning outcomes, engagement, and retention (Andrade, Huang, & Bohn, 2015; Garrett, et. al., 2019; Kirk, 2001; Özdilek & Özkan, 2009). Success of an instructional design team will rely heavily on leadership support and faculty buy-in. “The organizational structure that most positively influenced the ability for dedicated instructional designers to lead online learning initiatives was a centralized instructional design team with academic reporting lines. The results showed that decentralized dedicated instructional designers experienced significant disempowerment, role misperception, and challenges in advocacy and leadership, while dedicated instructional designers with administrative reporting lines experienced a high level of role misperception specifically related to technology support,” (Drysdale, 2018).
So how can we influence this change at our organizations? How do we prove that instructional design works and is not a threat to faculty autonomy? How do we set up the best ID shop possible?