The online education team saw great opportunity to evaluate the unit's business processes and welcomed an experimental mindset to rethink the course development process and how to better serve faculty. This led to innovation and the creation of an online education instance of Agile Accelerator, the department's customized project management application.
The online education team developed strategic priorities in December 2019, three months before the pandemic compelled the campus to pivot to online remote learning. The landscape for online teaching and learning changed dramatically. Previous priorities took a back seat to the overwhelming need to provide continuity in instruction. The shift to remote online instruction provided an opportunity to reimagine the processes in Online Education and explore innovative ways to manage our work while serving the campus.
This need provided a great opportunity to evaluate our unit's business processes and embraced an experimental mindset. The goal was to help identify solutions that would allow us to better serve faculty in the course development process, taking into account staff workloads, work-life balance and the need for quality online instruction.
In this presentation, we will discuss how our team adopted a growth-mindset to revamp the course development process and forged the path that led us to the creation of a customized instance of Agile Accelerator that fully tracks all course developments and projects within the unit.
This process innovation has allowed our unit to better identify:
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Development team capacity
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Staff workload & Work-life balance
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Project complexity through a predetermined tiered classification system
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Average Cost to Develop a Course
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Cost of Captioning & Accessibility needs
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Types of Project Requests and Faculty Support
The customized Agile Accelerator application has led to data driven decisions and allowed our unit to quantify the impact of our work. In this presentation, we will take participants through an interactivity of how the development teams use Agile Accelerator to track work in each phase of the development process. We will discuss the challenges we faced in digging deep into our business process and discuss lessons we learned along the way. We look forward to sharing what we have learned!