Scaling indivualized professional development: Using a CRM framework to support pedagogical transformation
Brief Abstract
This presentation will help participants: a) identify and prioritize the teaching development needs at their institutions; b) explain how a CRM approach can support ongoing teaching development; and c) create a process for implementing a CRM within their ID teams.
Presenters
Extended Abstract
Enrollment in online courses was steadily increasing year-over-year when the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 pushed the entire industry online all at once. This sudden shift to online education surfaced as many opportunities for online teaching and learning as it did critical needs for improvement (Chan et al., 2021). As Chan et al. (2021) highlighted, considerable work remains merely in the area of building competence to teach effectively online.
Martin et al. (2019) highlighted six competencies instructors need to succeed while teaching online. As with any skill, developing expertise requires ongoing and deliberate practice of specific aspects of that skill (Feltovich et al., 2018). Therefore, to support instructors as they develop their competencies for teaching online--and teaching more generally-- institutions must provide ongoing professional development opportunities for them. However, because institutional resources for providing such support are limited; the developmental needs of individual instructor varies widely; and how and when instructors are able to access developmental resources is constrained at the level of every individual instructor, it is challenging for institutions to create the relevant resources instructors needs as well as sustainable and scalable systems for distributing them.
In many ways, the creation and distribution of developmental resources is a simple business problem: determine what content is needed by whom and when, develop that content, create channels through which to distribute that content. In this metaphor, instructional design teams are manufacturers of and service providers for professional development resources and instructors are customers of those development products and services.
In instructional design--the field, the process, and the practice--instructors are rarely considered customers. A Google Scholar search of the terms "instructional design and customer relationship management" retrieved nearly 18,000 results since 2017 (April 14, 2021), but very few were actually related to instructional design and customer relations.
Radhakrishnan's (2018) study of instructional design roles included one quote from an instructional designer who considered faculty their customer. Drysdale (2019) saw faculty as instructional design customers exclusively as they sought technical assistance. Halupa (2019) suggested administering customer satisfaction surveys to help instructional design teams improve their work.
While collaboration between various stakeholders, including instructional designers and instructors, is often cited as essential to the success of instructional design processes (e.g., Bawa & Watson, 2017) little attention has been given to understanding instructors as consumers of instructional design services.
Customer relationship management (CRM) is becoming increasingly vital to organizational success and sustainability in all industries (Meena & Sahu, 2021). Though variously defined, CRM is essentially about obtaining new customers, maintaining existing customers, and making the business overall more effective and efficient (Meena & Sahu, 2021).
Given its primary purposes, a CRM approach is well-positioned to address the modern business challenge of instructional design teams--creating the right content, for the right people, and getting it to them at the right time.
This presentation will help participants: a) identify and prioritize the teaching development needs at their institutions; b) explain how a CRM approach can support ongoing teaching development; and c) create a process for implementing a CRM within their ID teams.