Rapid Prototyping and Quality Assurance: An Agile Approach to Instructional Design in Higher Education

Introduction 

This education session aims to introduce an agile approach to instructional design in a public university for online course design and development. During the session, three instructional designers (IDs) working in the same team will share best practices and showcase design artifacts based on an agile approach with the aim of informing and inspiring other IDs working in a similar higher education context. 

Significance of the Study 

Agile is a team-based project management approach that emphasizes iteration and openness to change (Torrance, 2019). It is an iterative, interactive, and highly flexible approach that accommodates frequent change, meets the clients’ needs, maintains timeline control, and emphasizes evaluation. Agile methodology has offered promising guidance to instructional design and is particularly recommended for moderate to large ID teams (Sweeney & Cifuentes, 2010). This session will provide real-world practices from a moderate-size ID team in a public university and help the audience delve deeper into the principles and practices of an agile approach. 

Key Takeaways 

By the end of this education session, the participants will be able to: 

• Recognize the benefits of adopting an agile approach to instructional design 

• Identify the process and artifacts for rapid prototyping and quality assurance 

Course Development Process 

In this section, we will describe the specific strategies and artifacts that have been implemented during our blended and online course development cycle. 

Course Mapping & Timeline 

A typical development cycle of an online course requires 16-20 weeks in our institution. Once an ID is assigned to a new project, the first step for the ID is to reach out to the instructor to set up an initial meeting. During the meeting, the ID and instructor will work together to create a tentative timeline given their project's specific contexts and needs. The second step typically starts with course mapping, including drafting measurable learning objectives, outlining the materials and assessments, and aligning different course components. This step typically takes about 2-4 weeks, depending on the iterative revisions and conversations between the instructor and ID. Once a course map or outline is finalized, it will enter the development stage as the third step for 8-10 weeks, becoming the most challenging stage for most IDs in higher education. 

Rapid Prototyping 

One of the core challenges felt by IDs everywhere is the pause in progress when waiting on additional content from faculty or subject matter experts (SMEs). Projects tend to fall behind when research and institutional/professional service commitments compete with teaching commitments. 

The rapid prototyping approach to instructional design works to alleviate this challenge for several reasons: 

• Rapid prototyping fundamentally relies on iterative design, meaning that early designs can be flawed. 

• Persons with significant expertise (i.e., faculty) find correcting mistakes easier and more satisfying than starting from scratch. 

• By creating templates, shells, and partially complete learning items with emergent and imperfect subject matter knowledge, an instructional designer can prompt a true expert to correct, complete, and fill in gaps during working meetings. 

• As a result, projects can make demonstrable and significant progress even without complete content deliverables from faculty partners. 

Relationship Building 

At the DAI, we prioritize people and interactions over strict processes. At the beginning of the course design process, we intentionally strived to build a positive relationship. This relationship provides the foundation that minimizes the difficult tasks involving the processes and expectations of course design. Frequently, our relationship-building efforts result in new requests to work with our ID team for other upcoming projects. 

The agile approach to instructional design also allows us to prioritize relationships within our team. Most of our projects required multiple IDs to collaborate with each other, and some of them also involved other teams in our division including the educational media team and continuing education team. Working together and utilizing strengths among teammates builds cohesion and superior results.  

Quality Assurance  

All the newly developed online/blended courses in our institution are required to meet the expectations of the Quality Matters (QM) Higher Education Rubric. Our course development cycle has been purposely designed with the QM rubric in mind from the beginning to the end. Any instructors who are new to online/blended learning must take self-paced, online training to get familiar with the QM rubric and our design process. Once an online course is developed, it will be assigned to another ID for quality review and then require iterative revisions if applicable. 

Plan for Interactivity 

A practice scenario for rapid prototyping will be introduced and implemented in a 15-minute design activity. Participants will be guided through a scenario in which they have recently been hired as an ID at a medical school with no prior knowledge of medicine. Each participant will contribute to developing a prototype of a mind map for medical students to diagnose a patient with a cough. A session facilitator will simulate the role of a faculty member providing partial information to the participants step by step. The value of the agile approach will be demonstrated through the activity and serve as a model for how to begin the rapid prototyping as part of the agile process. 

References 

Sweeney, D. S., & Cifuentes, L. (2010). Using agile project management to enhance the performance of instructional design teams. Educational Technology, 50(4), 34-41. 

Torrance, M. (2019). Agile for Instructional Designers: Iterative Project Management to Achieve Results. American Society for Training and Development.