In this workshop participants will identify examples of conflict between faculty and instructional designers, and apply two theories to identify possible causes. The group will then identify policies and practices that can address the root causes of these conflicts and improve collaboration between course design team members across universities.
Learning Outcomes
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Participants will identify conflicts that may interfere with the productive collaboration between faculty and instructional designers.
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Participates will map common conflicts onto theories of organizational power and transaction costs, using them to add explanatory power and identify systemic root causes.
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Participants will identify practices and procedures to improve faculty-ID working relationships.
Introduction and Theory
As universities and colleges offer a growing number of online courses, many institutions employ instructional designers (IDs) to support faculty in creating effective online and hybrid courses. Strong, productive collaborations between faculty members and instructional designers can produce higher quality online and hybrid courses than faculty can working alone (Outlaw & Rice, 2015). However, conflict often interferes with these collaborations and relationships (Castro-Figueroa, 2009).
Research on the relationship between faculty and instructional designers has found that effective collaboration occurs when different roles (curricular, social, managerial) are shared, but conflict also results due to different frameworks and expectations in classroom-based than online pedagogy (Castro-Figuera, 2009; Xu & Morris, 2007). Some factors that contribute to successful ID-Faculty relationships have been identified, including similarities in values, mutual respect, expertise and clear roles (Pan, Deets, Phillips, & Cornell, 2003; Pan & Thompson, 2009; Xu & Morris, 2007). Because of the exploratory and case-study nature of this research, however, the causes of conflict tend to focus on individual-level factors, rather than structural ones.
The presenters, who have a combined 25 years of involvement in online higher education in five different universities, from the perspectives of both faculty and program design, offer two theories rooted in organizational behavior and economics that may explain the ubiquity of this problem.
First, Transaction Costs theory, from the field of economics, suggests a way of looking at the faculty decision of whether to work with an ID in a similar way as firms make the decision of whether to produce within the firm or buy from outside. Actors recognize that there are costs of participating in an exchange and weigh them against the benefits. For example, a faculty member may compare the perceived costs of time or loss of autonomy that come from “transacting” or working with an ID on the course to the perceived benefit of improved student experience. While this theory has been used extensively to understand decisions made by firms (Williamson 1985), it has only more recently been applied to the setting of educational collaborations. This framework has been used to analyze the decision of academic researchers to collaborate (Landry 1998). Sinnewe (2015) has used it to examine the extent to collaborations between universities and private entities for research, and Schermann (2016) applied it to the decision to outsource IT.
An alternative framework for understanding conflicts that occur between faculty and IDs is the theory of organizational power. In this framing, power results from, and is the converse of, the cumulative dependence of one actor on another (Emerson, 1962). When there is imbalance, such that Actor A needs Actor B more than Actor B needs Actor A, then one actor has power over the other. One key sources of dependence within organizations is control over strategic contingencies, or interdependencies (Hickson, Hinings Lee, Schneck & Pennings, 1971). This control can be created by the ability to cope with uncertainty and there being few substitutes for the person’s capabilities; both of these are attributes of the faculty-ID relationship. Other sources of power in organizations that may be relevant to this context include expertise, legitimacy (formal authority) and information control (French & Raven, 1959; Raven, 1993).
These two theoretical frameworks reflect phenomena that occur in all universities and colleges: transaction costs of exchanging with others and power and dependence in relationships. The authors are developing an empirical, survey-based study of these factors. This workshop introduces the concepts and invites participants to describe critical incidents and map them into the elements of the theories. The theoretical frameworks, which are impersonal and systemic, enable the identification of preventive actions that otherwise may not be considered.
Process of the Workshop
The presenters will introduce the workshop by describing the conflict between faculty and instructional designers that prompted the author’s interest in this topic, highlighting the very different perspectives taken by each party. Participants will then be divided into small groups of either instructional designers or faculty members. Each group will be asked to reflect on challenging experiences with collaboration, generating examples on large post-it notes. This will produce a set of “critical incidents” (Flanagan, 1954).
These examples will be shared with all participants, and then categorized into causal factors that contribute to each of the two theories. For Transaction Cost theory, these causal factors include bargaining costs, decision costs, search costs, measurement costs, policing and enforcement costs. For Power-Dependence theory, these factors include interpersonal power, dependence, authority, expertise, information, ability to cope with uncertainty and substitutability. This will be done by placing the post-its on large posters that outline these theories.
The group will then explore how these theoretical frameworks help to understand the specific kinds of events that contribute to conflict. The group will collectively generate additional examples of the kinds of behavior or process that might contribute to conflict in the two theories. Instructional designers and faculty will be asked how they might perceive some of these behaviors differently.
In the last step, participants will use the theoretical frameworks to identify policies and practices that may reduce the sources of conflict, and thereby improve these relationships. For example, policies may be implemented to reduce faculty uncertainties about the availability of support and to clarify the time commitments. Dependencies may be equalized by implementing faculty evaluation of the instructional designer. Solutions generated by the group will be aggregated by the presenters, and shared on the conference website.
The presenters will then share the survey instrument they have developed to empirically investigate the relevance of these theories, and invite further audience collaboration following the conference.
References
Castro-Figueroa, (2009). Conflicts and Communication: Instructional Designer and Subject Matter Experts Developing Interdisciplinary Online Healthcare Content. Doctoral Dissertation, retrieved from http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/doc/305159744.html?FMT=AI.
Coase, R. H. (1937). The Nature of the Firm. Economica, (16). 386.
Emerson, R.M. (1962). Power-dependence relations. American Sociological Review, 27(1), 31-41.
Flanagan, J. (1954). The critical incidents technique. Psychological Bulletin, 51(4). Retrieved from https://www.apa.org/pubs/databases/psycinfo/cit-article.pdf.
French, J.R.P. and; Raven, B (1959). The bases of social power. Retrieved from file:///Users/rubinb/Downloads/French_&_Raven_Studies_Social_Power_ch9_pp150-167.pdf
Hickson, D.J., Hinings, C.R., Lee, C.A., Schneck, R.E., & Pennings, J.M. (1971). A strategic contingencies' theory of intraorganizational power. Administrative Science Quarterly, 16(2), 216-229.
Landry, R., & Amara, N. (1998). The impact of transaction costs on the institutional structuration of collaborative academic research. Research Policy, 27(9), 901-913.
Outlaw, & Rice, (2015)
Pan, C., Deets, J, Phillips, W, and Cornell, R (2003). Pulling tigers' teeth without getting bitten: Instructional designers and faculty. Quarterly Review of Distance Education, 4(3), 289-302.
Pan, C., & Thompson, K., (2009). Exploring dynamics between instructional designers and higher education faculty: An ethnographic case study. Journal of Educational Technology Development and Exchange, 2(1), 33-52.
Raven, B. (1993). Bases of power: Origins and recent developments. Journal of Social Issues, 49 (4), 227-251
Schermann, M., Dongus, K., Yetton, P., & Krcmar, H. (2016). The role of Transaction Cost Economics in Information Technology Outsourcing research: A meta-analysis of the choice of contract type. Journal Of Strategic Information Systems,25(1), 32-48. doi:10.1016/j.jsis.2016.02.004
Sinnewe, E., Charles, M. B., & Keast, R. (2016). Australia's Cooperative Research Centre Program: A transaction cost theory perspective. Research Policy, 45(1), 195-204. doi:10.1016/j.respol.2015.09.005
Stevens, K.B.(2013). Contributing factors to a successful online course development process. The Journal of Continuing Higher Education, 61(1), 2-11.
Williamson, O. E. (1985). The economic institutions of capitalism : firms, markets, relational contracting. New York : Free Press ; London : Collier Macmillan, c1985.
Xu, H. and Morris, L.V. (2007). Collaborative course development for online courses. Innovative Higher Education, 32, 35–47.