As COVOD-19 hit New Orleans hard in March, our workshop was almost ready to pilot. We quickly altered it to facilitate faculty course development for rapid transition from face-to-face delivery to online. Come hear our experiences from several perspectives: online faculty professional development, course development and delivery, and quality metrics.
Early experiences with curating, adapting, and creating Open Educational Resources illuminated a need for institution instructional designers (ID). Having no full-time IDs on staff and an inability to hire an ID, we decided to grow our own instructional designers. Funded by a grant from the Louisiana Community College & Technical System (LCTCS) during the 2019 academic year, four Louisiana institutions (two community, one 4-year pubic and one 4-year private) partnered to create a Fundamentals of Instructional Design (FoID) for non-designers. The initial FoID pilot started with nearly 80 faculty. Attrition was high and the course needed to be re-envisioned. We decided to break the course into a series of workshops. As COVOD-19 hit New Orleans hard in March, our revision of one workshop was almost ready to pilot. The workshop was further altered to facilitate faculty course development for rapid transition from face-to-face delivery to remote or online delivery.
The new workshop version was piloted by a small number of faculty teaching for one of the partner institutions. Although, the workshop is designed with the workflow from in-person sessions to online, the same process may be used to create course materials to be delivered in-person from online resources.
We will share our experiences from several perspectives: online faculty professional development, course development and delivery, quality metrics, and next steps. The session participants will have an opportunity to create equivalent online course activities from existing in-person activities via small group participation using an interactive handout. The session slide deck, the multimodal lesson plan worksheet, and the lesson quality metric instrument will be posted on the conference website. In addition, the link to the FOID: Transitioning a Lesson workshop will be available for participant use at their institutions.
The participants will experience the process of designing a course from one delivery mode to another. The session will open with a brief lecture with embedded polling introduction to the topic, break into small groups, and then come together again to share the group work results. During the lecture portion, the presenters will speak briefly about the motivation to a fundamentals of instructional design course and how it was re-envisioned to meet swift accommodation for online and remote teaching in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Sample of previous workshop attendee comments
“This was a more involved and, in some ways, more challenging workshop than I anticipated, but I found it useful for the (re)organization of my courses”. “I expected to be challenged and I was. Even though it was time consuming, I learned a lot”. “I learned that I needed this workshop, and that others can also benefit from it, even more than I. I learned more about modules, which will help in setting up my course this week. And I enjoyed killing two birds with one stone in creating my first module, which I have yet to submit here, but tomorrow”