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Welcome to the 10th edition of Design Matters Digest, a monthly newsletter that explores various elements of online course design and the research that can help you improve your Canvas courses. This month, we’re diving into the benefits and research-backed strategies for scaling course design best practices.
“Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how great an educational idea or intervention is in principle; what really matters is how it manifests itself in the day-to-day work of people in schools,”
(Sharples et al., 2018).
With institutions working to support a variety of important initiatives, it’s practical to ask: Why worry about scaling course design best practices? Well, research consistently shows that quality online course design and clear organization increase student motivation, learning, and retention (Joosten & Cusatis, 2019; Muljana & Luo, 2019). What’s more is that a baseline level of consistency across courses increases those benefits (Means et al., 2021; Scutelnicu et al., 2019), making scaling course design best practices a key lever for promoting learner success.
Yet, depending on a variety of factors at an institution–desire to change, capacity, and technological support–scaling any course design practice can prove complex. The good news: there are research-backed ideas for more easily streamlining best practice design processes and better supporting user adoption to guide your efforts!
Let’s explore some tips for scaling course design best practices and some tools to make the journey much more efficient. From identifying and defining your best practices to implementing and replicating them, these tips will have you scaling in a snap!
Convert the abstract to concrete. After identifying top priorities for instructional design improvements, develop concrete support–such as a checklist–to facilitate implementation. Not only can a simple checklist create a shared language between designers and instructors, it also acts as a reflective learning opportunity, promoting instructors’ ownership of the best practices! Take it a step further by building robust templates as concrete examples of quality course design. Fun fact: research indicates that even when a user opts not to use a template they’ve seen, their future course building often reflects elements of the template (Dalziel & Dalziel, 2011)!
Ease the implementation burden. Providing instruction on course design best practices for instructors to see while editing can lead to more effective application (Corral & Bradford, 2018). Keep support information succinct to avoid cognitive overload for course designers and use links for further learning. Perhaps your instructors need an extra nudge? Giving text suggestions as the default option in a template reduces the application lift for instructors and leverages the “principle of least effort,” increasing the likelihood that the best-practice is implemented (Jachimowicz et al., 2019; Thaler et al., 2010)!
Do it once and duplicate. Embracing the power of module structure can multiply course design efforts. While there is no single right way to pattern a module, engaging in backwards mapping to define a module structure allows designers to quickly duplicate a pattern and all the embedded best practices. Pair this work with templates designed to be flexible yet consistent to further boost your time-saving efforts. It’s easier to make adjustments to a module or template, when needed, than it is to build out a custom structure over and over. As a bonus: consistent course structure benefits learners as well!
“I’ve said this over and over again, we really could not have done this project without the Cidi Labs design tools because of the challenges and because of our need to align, to make things consistent, to honor best practices, and to provide accessibility as best we could.”
Jodi Mata, Ph.D., Director at Texas Education Agency
To see this Digest come to life, join us for our Design Matters Live! webinar “Scaling Course Design Best Practices” on October 22nd at noon Mountain Time. We’ll dive deeper into the research behind this digest edition and showcase amazing examples of how our tools can boost your ability to achieve dramatic, seemingly impossible course design feats at scale.
Do you love a real-world implementation story? See how Boston College used DesignPLUS to spread effective course design practices beyond online programs to on-campus courses. And if seeing is believing, watch our webinar with UTA to discover how DesignPLUS Action Items catapulted their efforts to meet Quality Matters standards.
Do you know someone who would like to receive our Design Matters Digest? Tell them they can subscribe here. Interested in more Design Matters content? Check out our webinar series and read past editions of the Digest.
Citations:
Corral, J., Post, M.D. & Bradford, A. Just-in-Time Faculty Development for Pathology Small Groups. Med.Sci.Educ. 28, 11–12 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40670-017-0516-z
Dalziel, J., & Dalziel, B. (2011). Adoption of learning designs in teacher training and medical education: templates versus embedded content. In Proceedings of the sixth International LAMS & Learning Design Conference 2011: Learning design for a changing world (pp. 81-88). LAMS Foundation, Macquarie University. http://lams2011.lamsfoundation.org/
Jachimowicz, Jon M., Shannon Duncan, Elke U. Weber, and Eric J. Johnson. “When and Why Defaults Influence Decisions: A Meta-analysis of Default Effects.” Behavioural Public Policy 3, no. 2 (November 2019): 159–186.
Joosten, T., & Cusatis, R. (2019). A cross-institutional study of instructional characteristics and student outcomes: Are quality indicators of online courses able to predict student success? Online Learning, 23(4), 354-378.
Means, B., Peters, V., Neisler, J., Wiley, K., & Griffiths, R. (2021). Lessons from Remote Learning during COVID-19. Digital Promise.
Muljana, P. S. & Luo, T. (2019). Factors contributing to student retention in online learning and recommended strategies for improvement: A systematic literature review. Journal of Information Technology Education: Research, 18, 19-57.
Scutelnicu, G., Tekula, R., Gordon, B., & Knepper, H. J. (2019). Consistency is key in online learning: Evaluating student and instructor perceptions of a collaborative online-course template. Teaching Public Administration, 37(3), 274-292.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0144739419852759
Sharples, J & Albers, Bianca & Fraser, S. (2018). Putting Evidence to Work: A School’s Guide to Implementation.
Thaler, Richard H. and Sunstein, Cass R. and Balz, John P., Choice Architecture (April 2, 2010). http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1583509
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