Relaxing in Asana: Mastering Your Course Development Projects

Concurrent Session 8

Session Materials

Brief Abstract

Designing and developing fully online course projects involves a lot of moving parts. But project manager is only one of the many hats instructional designers often wear. We discuss project management as we share our systematic online course development process while also ensuring high quality content and engaging all stakeholders.

Presenters

Lead Presenter: Edward Queen, Johns Hopkins University

Edward Queen is a Quality Assurance Manager at the Center for Learning Design within the Whiting School of Engineering. His career in education, which spans almost 20 years, began as an elementary school teacher after graduating with his BA in Elementary Education from Purdue University (#BoilerUp). During his 5-year teaching career, he obtained his MS.Ed. in Learning Design and Technology, also from Purdue (#HammerDown). He subsequently worked as an instructional designer at the National Foreign Language Center at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he developed e-learning objects for globally dispersed government foreign language and intelligence analysts. He joined the Johns Hopkins University in August 2010. Since then, he has designed and developed more than 100 online courses and has developed and delivered a wide range of faculty development opportunities. In March 2022, he was accepted into Indiana University's Instructional Systems Technology Ed.D. program. Ed lives in Lafayette, Indiana with his wife Kelly (also Hopkins staff), three children (two boys and a girl--all teenagers), two golden retrievers (Strider and Hugo), and one orange tabby (Milo). He enjoys reading, playing Overwatch, watching TV and movies, and flying his DJI Mavic 2 Pro drone.

Co-presenter: Toni Picker, Johns Hopkins University

Extended Abstract

Even with a solid process for designing and developing fully online courses, managing all the moving parts can be tricky. At times, our team has struggled to meet deadlines, organize deliverables, and communicate project details to colleagues, faculty, and administrators--frustrating everyone involved. If you’re like us, you’ve experienced these challenges and discovered mid-project that your project management process didn’t include enough flexibility to accommodate changing needs. If you’re like us, you’ve also wondered if there wasn’t a better way to manage these projects.

In this session, we begin by inviting participants to share challenges they face in managing online course design and development projects. Next, we will share our systematic process for course design and development and the challenges we have faced.

We will then discuss our adoption of a project management tool, Asana, aligning our process to participant shared processes. We will demonstrate the Asana features that address many of the project management difficulties we have faced, including a master schedule template that was developed specifically to meet our project challenges.

Next, we will look at our latest efforts to expand our use of Asana, the inclusion of a WordPress site, a few web forms, and a little bit of scripting to further address common project management challenges while removing several repetitive project tasks. We will discuss how we built a data visualization dashboard that gives stakeholders real-time project updates, allowing for data customization based on multiple high-level categories.

Finally, we will present plans for: one, designing a study to measure the effectiveness of introducing our project management process to meeting overall project deadlines; and two, expanding our system to remove further repetition and add time saving opportunities. 

We conclude by polling participants on how they currently manage their projects and how they might use a framework like ours to manage projects at their institution. We will share a public link to our base template and other documentation that participants can use as a starting point for tailoring their own project schedule