To ensure high quality in online courses, it is essential to have alignment among the processes for instructional design, performance support, and evaluation. This presentation will share how changes were implemented to bring about alignment and create climate change within the ecosystem of course design, development, evaluation, and faculty support.
An ecosystem is defined as “a system, or a group of interconnected elements, formed by the interaction of a community of organisms with their environment” (Ecosystem, n.d.). In biological terms, an ecosystem is said to be in balance when the components are in harmony (WWF Global, n.d.). Balance is what makes an ecosystem sustainable and responsive to changes around it. Just like plants, animals, land, and water form an ecosystem, the processes for online course design and development, course evaluation, and professional development for faculty course developers and instructors form an ecosystem, each component dependent on the others. In order for the course development ecosystem to be in balance, the processes for designing and developing courses must align with how courses will be evaluated, and with how faculty are being prepared to design courses and how they are supported throughout the design process. If these processes are not balanced, the ecosystem will fall out of harmony.
According to the annual Babson Survey Research Group survey, in the fall of 2014, more than 2.8 million students in the United States were taking all of their college courses at a distance, representing 14% of all higher education students. Additionally, another 14% of students reported taking some, but not all, of their courses online. These numbers represent a 19% increase since the survey began in 2002 (Allen, Seaman, Poulin, & Straut, 2016). In 2001, the Tennessee Board of Regents formed the Regents Online Degree Program (RODP), which in 2015 became known as TN eCampus. TN eCampus is a collaborative of six state universities and thirteen community colleges. Since its inception, TN eCampus has grown from just 63 online courses to a catalog of over 500 courses, including over 30 degree and certificate programs from the associate’s to master’s levels. Enrollments grew 88% from 2001 to 2011, with nearly 20,000 enrollments per semester in AY 2015-2016.
For any kind of rapid growth or development, a systematic approach must be taken to manage growth. Driven by a statewide initiative to put high enrollment courses on a review and development cycle to provide for accessibility and promote quality, TN eCampus conducted a self-evaluation of its processes and readiness to meet that challenge. Finding itself out of balance, TN eCampus embarked on a strategy for a global climate change within its ecosystem. This strategy focused on the alignment of processes for course design and development, faculty professional development, and course evaluation. The underlying framework for effecting these changes was the belief that standards for course quality should drive course evaluation, that faculty development should prepare faculty course developers to meet those standards, and that the course development process should be informed by the evaluation process while supporting faculty as they worked to meet the standards for course quality and accessibility.
The first shift in the climate was the adoption of the mantra “Partners in the Process”, with faculty course developers and TN eCampus instructional designers, performance support staff, and accessibility specialists as members of a unified team. This change in mindset set the stage for the implementation of new standards, a new design process, and a new support model.
In the previous climate, faculty course developers were given a quality assurance checklist by which to gauge the design of their course. This tool focused more on conformance with a template and technical settings than pedagogical considerations and had fallen out of alignment with what TN eCampus valued as a quality online course. Finding that existing rubrics such as Quality Matters did not meet the needs of TN eCampus, a new rubric was developed that focused on three aspects: instructional design and pedagogy, technical quality assurance and course structure within the LMS, and standards for accessibility compliance. With new standards identified and a rubric developed, a move was made to reshape views on faculty development and support throughout the course development process.
Faculty training and performance support are key factors in quality course development. Performance support for faculty should be ongoing and concurrent and reflect the expectations for course design, development, and evaluation. In a faculty training mindset, faculty do not often receive the ongoing support and motivation afforded by a performance support model (Fang, 2007). At TN eCampus, like many institutions, once faculty completed formal training, they were largely on their own. Faculty were given little to no guidance as to the pedagogy of online teaching and learning and training focused more on technical use of the learning management system (LMS). To remedy this, TN eCampus created and implemented the Course Developer Program (CDP), a holistic approach to supplant training with ongoing faculty development and support with a balance between pedagogy and technical skills. In the new climate, course design and development is mapped out over a period of twelve weeks, with flexibility for an additional four to eight weeks if needed. For the first eight weeks of that process, faculty course developers participate in a concurrent, completely online, asynchronous course with modules that address each phase of a systems approach to course design. For example, in the first two weeks of the design process, the focus is on mapping course outcomes to modules and developing module learning objectives, and working with the course template in the LMS. The CDP course provides guidance and strategies for these tasks and for each phase of the development process to follow. Material in the CDP course, along with templates and course planning worksheets, reinforce best practices at the same time as faculty work through each stage of course design and development in the LMS. Another component of the CDP was the creation of the Knowledge Base for Course Developers reference guide. The Knowledge Base guide provides just-in-time support when an instructional designer is not available.
In order to manage the large number of high-enrollment courses to be redeveloped, course development was slated to be done in waves, with multiple course developers beginning their development cycle at about the same time, and going through the course as a cohort, forming a community of practice. In the sixth week of the development process, after three modules of the online CDP course, faculty course developers have a one-on-one consultation with an instructional designer to evaluate the course design at the halfway point. In another component of the CDP, TN eCampus worked with several faculty mentors to establish an online Learn Lab Community (LLC), seeding it with resources and setting up discussion boards, wikis, and groups, so that faculty would have a resource to carry them beyond the online course in course design and development. Together, the resources of the CDP provide timely professional development and ongoing support to faculty as they develop, or redevelop, online courses, and prepare to maintain them in semesters to come as lead instructors.
TN eCampus’ integrated approach represents a change in climate from one where faculty course developers were trained to one where they are supported, from where courses were built to one where they are carefully designed, and from where assessment of course quality focused more on technical settings to one where the focus is on the pedagogy of online teaching and learning. By rethinking each aspect of the course design ecosystem and being open to wide change, TN eCampus has been able to realign the course design and development process and provide ongoing professional development and performance support for faculty course developers, all based on a set of standards for quality online courses aligned with the course evaluation process. This session will share some of the challenges of such wide-scale change and the benefits of putting the ecosystem back in balance, aligning processes, supports, and assessments in a climate where course quality and faculty support go hand-in-hand.
References:
Allen, I.A., Seaman, J., Poulin, R., & Straut, TT. (2016). Online report card: Tracking online education in the United States. Babson Park, MA: Babson Survey Research Group and Quahog Research Group. Retrieved from http://onlinelearningconsortium.org/read/online-report-card-tracking-online-education-united-states-2015/.
Ecosystem. (n.d.). In The American Heritage® New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition. Retrieved May 13, 2016, from http://www.dictionary.com/browse/ecosystem.
Fang, B. (2007). A performance-based development model for online faculty. Performance Improvement, 46(5), 17-24.
WWF Global. (n.d.). Ecological balance. Retrieved from https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/10/.