TIMELINE
Around 2021
FORMAT
Web
ROLE
Instructional Designer & SME
Background
The Teaching Online Workshop is a course that serves as a resource for faculty on how to teach online, enhancing the online experience for both themselves and their students. My coworker and I became aware of problems with the online course experience from both teachers and students. Our job involved heavy interaction with instructors and we almost always received complaints from them about how much they didn’t like it and preferred teaching in person. We held frequent workshops throughout the school semesters but attendance was sporadic and not everyone watched the session recordings. We determined that we needed a static way to teach best practices that teachers can go back and reference and find what they are looking for easily. That’s how the idea to create a faculty onboarding course came about.
Responsibilities & Key Contributions
Product Design
I worked with another instructional designer on this project where we served as both the subject matter experts and the course designers.
User Researcher
Conducted interviews with professors and students to understand their current pain points with online courses.
Collaborator
I collaborated another instructional designer to build this course.
Problem Identification
The teachers’ frustrations and/or lack of experience was felt by the students. From the students’ end, we’d hear complaints about lackluster professors and noticed that some courses had lower completion rates. When it came to trying to understand user needs we relied on first hand accounts with professors, feedback surveys they had filled out after our workshops, and previous focus groups we had conducted with students to gain more in-depth insights.
Lack of familiarity with technology
A lot of professors were not tech-savvy. They did not know how to use the online platform and this showed in their online classes. There would be missing assignments, unclear submission policies, and more. This led to an overall sense of confusion between them and their students.
Ineffective pedagogical approaches
Professors did not know how to adapt their classroom to an online setting. For example, one of the main complaints from students was a lack of community in their online classes.
Goals
To reduce the amount of student complaints received.
A high number of complaints distracted professors from other pertinent tasks and inundates our support team.
To increase the professors’ course completion rates.
We wanted to ensure that more students could successfully complete the courses.
Impact
33%
Increase in course completion rates
26%
Decrease in student complaints
Audience
University of Miami faculty
Process
Design Delegation
I was responsible for content related to effective learning objectives, giving proper feedback, inclusivity and accessibility, academic integrity, building community, and proactive communication. My colleague was responsible for all the content related to the learning management system (Blackboard Ultra) itself, assignments, assessments, discussions, standards of excellence, and gradebooks and analytics.
We came to this decision after the initial brainstorming of core topics we wanted to cover. We wrote down these topics in a shared Google Doc and the way we came up with these topics was based on our personal experiences with faculty and students along with data on important facets of online teaching. We then wrote our names down next to the topic we wanted to cover in the course.
Course Build
We began working on the course in Blackboard Ultra. We wanted to include various deliveries of the content so we used things like videos, text, and interactive images to convey different messages. When it came to the process of writing content for this course, I reviewed various research articles and other information sources to synthesize appropriate and effective information for each of my topics. These resources were all referenced in case the learner wanted to gain more knowledge on the topics.
Usability Testing
After completing the initial draft, we gave our fellow team members access to the course to gain their feedback. Afterwards, we released the course to a small subset of professors to ensure that the course was meeting the needs of our intended audience. These professors were chosen because their online classes were well received by students and they were experts at teaching online. They were also very plugged in to their community and were aware of the challenges that existed. We sent them emails asking if they’d be interested in reviewing the course.
Once they agreed, we gave them all a link to an online survey where they could submit their comments and a deadline for submission. We took their comments and used them to make the appropriate edits to the course. Afterwards, we released the course and allowed for those who were interested in the content to gain access.