Gracefully herding cats: Systematizing instructional design and quality assurance without losing your mind
Abstract: Any of us who work in faculty professional development or instructional design-related capacities at public universities are likely facing some of the same challenges, many of which boil down to the ever-present charge to “do more with less.” To that end, our unit, whose mission it is to promote high-quality, media-rich technology-enhanced courses, implemented a semester-long cohort-based course development process, which is structured and guided by concurrent instructional design-related faculty professional development. Now that we are five years in to this endeavor, this paper represents a description of our ongoing efforts to address challenges we continue to discover and face. We highlight three strategic actions which have helped us meet the needs of changing audiences and higher-ups: broadening how we offer our professional development curriculum, changing the nature of that curriculum to make it more efficient and flexible, and changing how we assess mastery of instructional design concepts and archive the artifacts produced by that. We aim to share this to help others facing similar challenges do not just more, but also better, with less.
Presider: Kimberly Harrison, Aurora University