Brooke's Evaluation Site for EDIT 5584

The Faculty Course Design and Development Cohort is an ongoing program created by and facilitated by the Learning Experience Design (LED), a department of Technology-enhanced Learning and Online Strategies (TLOS), which is a division of the Division of Information Technology at Virginia Tech. The program began in 2014 and has been continuously offered each semester since that time. The program offers faculty who are seeking to design or redesign courses for a variety of delivery modes such as: flipped, blended, networked, or multi-model to work together in an interdisciplinary cohort in a semester-long professional development course. It begins with the faculty participant attending a full-day workshop and then continues the program with weekly meetings with an instructional designer, which is also accompanied by a weekly module related to professional development. The weekly meetings with an instructional designer entails having questions/concerns answered, a discussion about the faculty participant’s progress, as well as a discussion on the preparation of content, learning activities and assessments.

 

The goal of the cohort program is to empower the Learning Experience Design staff to provide effective professional development and instructional design support for for the design or redesign and development of courses to meet the standards of Virginia Tech and to ensure compliance with policies like the Distance Learning policy #6364 as well as with nc-SARA agreement, certification and licensing requirements and SACS accreditation requirements. In order to achieve this, the courses are not only certified as having passed the quality review process, but completing course also results in certification of faculty as “masters” of teaching in the delivery mode for which the course was developed.

 

The Provost provides funding support through Design and Develop Awards managed by TLOS. This funding requires course release or other accommodations to allow faculty sufficient time and focus to dedicate to the course development project. There is a need to assist faculty to complete a course design/redesign and development in one semester in which funding is provided. The approach was initially developed to address the growing number of course design projects that were not being completed in a timely manner (or at all).

 

Since the approach was initiated in the Spring of 2014, some factors have led to a desire for an evaluation of the program. One such concern, as noticed by the primary stakeholder, is that the professional development and quality assurance review process can be seen as ‘busy work’ and not as the foundational work of designing and developing a high-quality course. Another concern is that the focus of the program may be on ‘getting the work done’ and not on the long-term effect the process can have on the teaching practices, classroom management, assessment techniques, etc. that are elements of the professional development. In addition, there seems to be a trend of front-loading the professional development instead of using it to structure the weekly tasks to be completed on the design and development of trying to “get through” instead of applying the information. The program has been ongoing for a few years and it has been decided that it is time for an evaluation to be conducted so it can be determined if the program is meeting its goals and if any modifications need to be made.

 

The evaluation of the program is not required by the University, but rather is an initiative of the Senior Director of Learning Experience Design who also initially established the program. The Senior Director oversees both the professional development and instructional design consultations, as well as the supporting staff who are providing the graphics, web-based, media development, etc.