Join us for a candid exploration of the instructional designer (or teaching, learning, and technology professional) and faculty relationship in higher education and processes used to foster effective collaboration. The context is (re)designing courses in a blended format, sometimes taking faculty into new directions with their teaching or introducing them to more formal course design approaches like backwards design. Instructional designers are tasked with helping faculty work within available time or resource constraints as well as researching effective and innovative teaching and learning approaches or new technologies. What is required from both the professor and instructional designer to successfully (re)design a course?
This session is an addendum to and continuation of our Academic Commons/NITLE article, The Professor and the Instructional Designer: A Course Design Journey (1). While demonstrating a technology tool, a covert instructional design move led to a blended redesign for a biology course. Out of this successful experience grew another redesign collaboration that involved three faculty leading a large enrollment gateway course for pre-health students and biology majors. Well briefly present our course design methods and process of collaboration to help set context and prime our participants for lively small group activities.
The majority of our session will be interactive. We will engage participants in sharing their own experiences and processes for (re)designing blended courses, being in collaborations with faculty, and working with teaching, learning, and/or technology professionals. To explore the instructional designer/faculty relationship we will facilitate small group activities built upon participatory asset mapping and design thinking techniques as we aim to answer the questions: How can we make the most out of course (re)design collaborations? What communication strategies and project management processes work well to foster effective collaborations?
Participants will leave our session with new ideas, inventive strategies, suggestions for processes, and a shared experience on how to make the most of a faculty/instructional designer collaboration for blended course (re)design. Session leaders will summarize the narratives, ideas, small group activities, and interesting discussion points that will grow out of our session. This summary will get shared out via our session webpage and blog post at http://sites.dartmouth.edu/edtech.
(1) http://www.academiccommons.org/2014/07/24/the-professor-and-the-instruct...
