Do you want to empower faculty to build quality online courses and apply DEI-aligned, student-centered best practices across all courses? Join us as we demonstrate a collaborative course design partnership using a blueprint design model based on Gagné’s Nine Events of Instruction in order to provide professional development for instructors.
The course development process between instructional designers and instructors can often be transactional, with instructors sharing materials by request, with less insight into the pedagogical process for the course build. This can cause the course design to be more content-focused than student-centered as instructors naturally default to teaching the way they were taught, which is not always aligned with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) principles.
In Fall 2021, the instructional design team at our university sought to create a more collaborative experience that simultaneously provided an opportunity for faculty professional development as part of the course design process. In addition to developing a quality online course, a key component of the professional development piece is to educate instructors on UDL principles and teaching strategies aligned with DEI principles. To accomplish this, a course blueprint model was adopted, with a distinct difference from traditional models. While it may feel intuitive for instructors to create materials in the order that students will experience them, beginning with readings and lecture content and ending with activities and assessments, our blueprint asks instructors to work through development tasks from a pedagogical perspective, in which outcomes and assessments are addressed before learning materials are created. As such, our blueprint draws on Gagné’s Nine Events of Instruction and asks instructors to move through them from a backward design approach. The ultimate goal of the blueprint development model is for all courses to meet the standards on our Quality Assurance in eLearning Rubric, which was modeled after the Quality Matters Higher Education rubric. This process ensures consistent quality across courses within online programs, creating an inclusive, equitable, and consistent experience for online students.
Our assessment of this approach conveys positive results, including student survey responses about their learning experiences in courses designed under this model. Additionally, many of our faculty who have completed the process have adopted DEI aligned teaching strategies across other courses and modes of instruction. They are now being recognized in a faculty spotlight series, highlighting their course design experience, innovative assessments, and student-centered approach to teaching.
This session will walk attendees through our collaborative design process, showcasing our Gagné inspired blueprint and corresponding Canvas template. Our process will demonstrate how the order in which instructors must think through their units of instruction differs from the ways in which students will move through the content, as well as how the ID and instructor work in partnership. The result is an inclusive and equitable learner-centered course with clearly mapped outcomes and assessments, and weeks worth of professional development for instructors who develop skills they can apply across courses and modes of instruction. This session will call on audience members to participate in various ways throughout the presentation, including contributing prior knowledge, examples, answering polls, and Q&A. Audience members may be asked to use their phones for activities, and handouts will be provided.