Institutions look for innovative and lean ways to ensure essential functional design, development and operational practices for producing quality-driven online programming. Participants will create a scalable framework for agile, quality online learning programming that aligns and coalesces with existing or emerging frameworks, workflows, guidelines and quality standards.
Institutions are often interested in benchmarking the quality of their programming-- whether student success rates, satisfaction surveys, regional and programmatic accreditation, standards, or quality scorecards. Most often we evaluate our end products through use of these tools, but how often do we inform, evaluate and iterate the process for how we arrived at a quality learning experience, course, or program?
How better to innovate than to take the indicators of quality and extend them to the work that we do to get there. By aligning instructional design, development and ongoing operations work with the various quality scorecards, programmatic and even regional accreditation standards in a framework document, stakeholders can share vision, mission, strategy, and even minute tactics cogently and coherently with others regardless of their prior knowledge or assumptions. Such a document can agilely sustain, scale and iterate over time to meet (or exceed) evolving internal and external needs and innovations to ensure ongoing maturation.
In this workshop, we will engage as experts in a Community of Practice (CoP) to facilitate the creation of quality-referenced design, development and operations frameworks that will drive quality programming for each participant’s organization.
Participants will contribute to this completely hands-on effort as each begins building a framework document containing mission, strategy, standards, effective practices, and operations for driving a quality “learner experience” (LX) through impactful, conscious collaborations. We will draw from instructional design, programmatic development and operations, quality indicators from scorecards, accreditation standards, and even the user experience (UX) industry, gleaning some best practices in user-centered design (UCD), and Universal Design for Learning (UDL). A product of our discussions will be emerging frameworks that participants will each align with one or more quality scorecards to proactively ensure quality and to promote an agile workflow. Each framework will become a living document that can easily grow and mature over time to meet evolving needs and innovations relative to quality online programming.
Participants will be invited to share their own existing or emerging frameworks. Workshop facilitators will share an exemplar framework as a starting point for discussion and focus.
Outcomes
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List various quality scorecards, regulatory requirements, and regional and programmatic accreditation requirements
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Describe the use-cases for each of the identified quality references/scorecards
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Select applicable quality reference(s)/scorecard(s) to their own organization
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Debate the value proposition of a framework for the functional design, development and operation of an online learning environment
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Align a design, development, operations framework/workflow with one or more quality scorecards
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Create an agile, scalable, sustainable framework document that will drive quality and keep pace with the ever-evolving quality standards
Issues raised
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What works in current frameworks, manifestos, design guidelines, and scorecards?
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What and where are the gaps in quality programming?
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What does it mean to be agile in online programming?
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How do we merge (triangulate) the “best of” collaboratively into an agile, scalable, sustainable document structure that will drive quality and keep pace with the ever-evolving quality standards?
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What do stakeholders need to know to become agile in their thinking and actions towards operationalizing a vision for innovation at their institutions?
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What is the way forward: short-term and longer-term action items to address the gaps?