Process Details

A large amount of effort the team put into the project was to develop a sustainable process for course development. As the university looked towards scaling up its efforts in online programs, the team found that a lot of practices and processes had to evolve and change. The practice of designing a single course was quite different to designing two complete programs with 36.

Throughout the project the team continuously re-developed and iterated the processes to the point that it was stable, scalable and adaptable. The following outlines each of the key stages in the processes and outlines the key outputs and information generated at each stage.

1. Discovery

The Discovery stage kicks off the process and the team introduce themselves and the way it works to the Course Authors. The other aim for this stage is for the Learning Designers to gain an understanding of any existing courses or materials, and to begin to identify areas that require change and development.

The Learning Designer has access to previous versions of the course and can explore the existing content, assessments, structure and textbooks. This step acts as an audit of the course and forms a picture of the course. This is captured in the Course Catalogue, and artefact that maps key aspects of the course experience including information about the current assessments, the topics covered in the course, the kinds of interactions with students, what is covered in lectures, slides and readings. This helps the Learning Designer and the broader team to develop an understanding of the course and the kinds of questions you might want to ask the Course Coordinator.

The Course Coordinator is the person who has taught the course previously and may be different from the Course Author that has been assigned. It is important to conduct a Coordinator Interview with the person who has had experience in teaching an existing course as you they will be able to discuss what issues may exist, how certain decisions about the course have been made, what changes or improvements could be made and what areas of the course students struggle with.

The interview and your catalogue will help to finalise a Course Report, a consolidated plan for developing the course. The report should outline any issues or concerns a Learning Designer may have, the difficulty of the task ahead and suggestions for change or additional resourcing and support. The development of this resource was an opportunity for peer review and feedback on the interpretation of the course and any suggestions to take into the next stage.

2. Co-create

The co-creation phase is where the majority of design work takes place. The aim of is to set up the parameters of the course and to map out what it will look like over its duration. A couple of important steps take place during this phase.

The first is the assessment design. The aim here is to discuss the alignment of assessments to the learning outcomes and to plan out the tasks and activities students will undertake. To achieve this it is useful to think of assessments as evidence or proof that the students can demonstrate those learning outcomes. The Learning Designer ensures that the evidence is robust and clearly demonstrates that the student has met the expected threshold to pass. The discussions around assessment should bring clarity to:

This work culminates in the development of the Assessment Brief document. At this point in time they may not be 100% complete (dates of submission and the full marking rubric may be missing), but they should be in a state that they can inform the next step in the process – the Course Map.

The Course Map is the development of clear and concise map of the course across its duration. The map marks out the Assessments, when they will be worked on and include a start and end date. The map also outlines the topics covered across each week of study. These will often reflect the Course Catalogue, but there may be a need to move and change the sequence of topics throughout this process. This is why we a tool like Miro is used to carry out this step. The course map also provides an opportunity to introduce the Learning Types & Activities to the course author as a way of starting to map out what the experience might look like week-to-week. This can be done in a simple way by using the Time-on-Task table and for each week and assigning how long they wish students to spend on each type of activity over the week. This provides a rudimentary 'budget' to work with throughout the development cycle, but also can help to highlight concerns and issues with the design of the course, often a mismatch between the intended experience and the reality that is being planned out.

One of the challenging parts of the Course Map is the process of moving from Topics to Lessons. This part of the process is essentially working with the course author to convert the large topics into addressable Lesson questions. By breaking down a topic into What, How, Why, Who, When and Where questions it helps determine the scope of learning and, how much time and effort is required to create the learning resources and activities. At the early stages this can seem cumbersome but this step assists in defining what the course really needs to cover. Some of the lessons may move and merge as you work your way through this process but by the end of the step you will have 12 weeks of the course mapped out with a clear idea of sequence of learning, the assessment process and a firm idea of the activities students will be doing each week. It has proven the the more activities, resources from the catalogue, ideas you have for discussions, practice items and review points that make it into the map the better a course is scaffolded and easier to develop. Using the colour coding for Learning Types also helps to visually guage the experience and if there are missing activity types and hence types of learning and ways for students to engage in the course.

The end of this stage is another opportunity for peer review and discussion about the course. You should feel comfortable with presenting this back to the team and getting feedback on the proposed course design.

3. Development

The development stage is where most of the time and effort is spent during the development cycle. The aim of this stage is to create the full course as a storyboard, including developing content for lessons, videos, activities, media and interactives prior to the final course being built in platform.

The team developed a new tool to streamline this process – hence the Smart Storyboard. Once your Course Map is complete Lessons can be added to the Modules in the Smart Storyboard. Each Lesson can then be worked on and fleshed out via a conversation with the Course Author to get them familiar with the tool and the process. Each Lesson is made up of modular Blocks and each one of these can be associated with an Learning Type, and a Learning Patterns. The framing text and explanation of each learning pattern is then available to the course author within the tool itself.

The tool is designed to be used iteratively. The first run through the course will just be using the Course Map to add each Lesson and use the Blocks to plan out the learning sequence. Blocks don't have to be populated with content immediately, so often prompts and suggestions are added that provide context and direction for those assigned as authors. Each Block can be assigned to the relevant person, developed further at which point those blocks my need to broken up and other activities added.

The ability to assign blocks, comment, add media and readings into the course helps to centralise communications with the other teams - Project Management and Media Production – and helps to provide clarity to Course Authors as to what they are required to do. The tool has the ability to provide useful status and progress updates and helps to provide a nuanced understanding of the course and how it is progressing.

4. Build

During the build stage most of the technical work is handled by the Digital Education Developers and the Media Production team. The Learning Designer also works closely with the Course Authors on videos, working with them in studio and assisting in the editing and final transcripts. The course will be created in MyUni (Canvas) alongside all visual elements and media. Smart Storyboard is used to track the status of the build ensuring that all content and media are moved into platform once they are complete and ready.

5. Review

The review stage has students and faculty review the course in platform, highlighing any errors mistakes or problems that are encountered. The Course Development team also performs a quality assurance check before working with the Program Coordinators to achieve final signoff and ensure the course is ready to teach.