Collaboration, Flexibility, and Creativity: Keys to Creating a High-Performance Course Production Team
Concurrent Session 8
Brief Abstract
The pressure of creating online courses quickly and with limited resources can be an obstacle to producing the innovative courses your students deserve. In this session you’ll learn how organize a team that can meet the demands of course production through collaboration, flexibility, and creativity.
Extended Abstract
This session will focus on course production strategies used by a unit that is responsible for course production for a premiere online program at a prominent university. The unit was created to produce high-volume, quality, online courses quickly, and to scale. We’ll discuss the organization of the team, the approaches to course production and how our processes have evolved to meet the expectations of students, faculty, and administration.
The skills needed to produce an engaging online course go beyond learning design, yet instructional designers are often the backbone of online the course production process. Instructional designs are often responsible for a wide array of areas such as: learning design, educational technology, multimedia production and faculty development. It requires them to be skilled in managing faculty relationships, graphic design, web design, videography, educational technology, and project management. While some may have skills in a several of these areas, it is more common that a person has more expertise in one or a few of these areas. Even if a person possessed most of these skills to a significant degree, the time involved in executing all that needs to be done in each area is an obstacle to executing and fulfilling the vision for the course. There is only so much one person can do.
Since time is a critical factor, single threading the work to be done through one individual not only inhibits what can be accomplished in the course, such as, developing innovative assignments, creating multimedia, and implementing learning tools. It also creates a single point of failure in the event a person is unable to fulfill their duties. People get sick, go on vacation, and sometimes leave the organization. Collaboration and redundancy create a safety net to keep the work going. Collaboration also provides an abundance of ideas and solutions. While collaboration isn’t something that comes naturally to all people, especially people who are accustomed to working in a silo, it has been our experience that once people experience the support given through collaboration, and the quality of the product, their understanding towards collaboration can shift.
The session will review our unit’s organizational structure and the various skills of the individuals, and their career paths. We’ll delve into how new work is brought into the unit and how it is, evaluated and prioritized, as well as the processes followed to execute a full development. At the core of all the processes is redundancy and peer-review, as well as a framework that is flexible and responsive to individual faculty/course needs, and to changing priorities and initiatives. We’ll also cover our rigorous onboarding process that helps support the entire team do their job to the best of their ability.
Interaction in the session will start with a live discussion regarding current production demands and expectations of production units large or small, and ideas of what can be done to meet the demands. We’ll have index cards they can write their answers down on and will read some of the responses. We’ll share in detail how at each step of the process the people doing the work are supported and have what they need to get the job done. We’ll also share examples of our work and provide a postcard with a QR code to follow-up with us for further discussion.