Page 18 - Campus Technology, March/April 2019

teaching & Learning
years ago from Yavapai College in Arizona, said he focuses on building personal relationships. “When I talk to faculty here, the hardest thing for me to get past is them seeing me as the guy who might fix their printer,” he said. “I realized that the best thing I have to offer the University of Washington was lost the moment I arrived here — and that was 10 years of trusting rela- tionships developed with faculty at Yavapai Col- lege.” He had to begin building those from scratch at Bothell.
The Office of Digital Learning & Innovation used to put out a call for proposals for anybody who wanted to participate in course redesign efforts. “Now we are targeting specific schools and approaching the dean and asking him or her to get 10 faculty members together and find 10 courses that are high-enrollment or mandatory, and let’s see if we can’t get those faculty to work together for a year,” Conaway said. “We are working more with groups in a cohort model.”
He also enjoys working with faculty members on an informal basis. “I want to work with faculty individually and see them progress as educators, from wherever they are today to wherever we can get them to tomorrow,” he said. “While it is nice to get a group of courses moving toward hybrid or online, I see those faculty develop as educators in ways that inform all of their cours- es, whether face-to-face or online.”
Be Flexible
Dartmouth’s DeSilva said university instruction- al design teams should remain flexible and open to new opportunities that present themselves. “We find ourselves right now coordinating a
Learning Fellows Program that grew out of a course redesign initiative,” she said. The program creates partnerships between professors, under- graduate students, learning designers and fac- ulty developers to design and deliver active and collaborative learning environments. Learning fellows support faculty by helping small groups of students interact with each other and engage more deeply in the course material through in- class problem-solving sessions, discussions, projects and other activities.
“Running it out of our department has been an interesting adventure,” she said. “We have got- ten more faculty development and meaningful course redesign and excellent relationship build- ing through this program than through anything else we have done. It was a completely different thing to take on. It involves student employees and doing payroll. It wasn’t in our wheelhouse. It is nice we were able to stand that up, because we have really seen some meaningful change.”
Whatever technology course redesign involves, instructional designers are increasingly focused on humanizing course materials and empathetic design. “I always start with asking faculty what they want their students to get out of their course experience, and we talk through that before we start any design work,” said Penn State’s Davis. “There is a saying that people ignore design that ignores people. You can set something up with the best of intentions, but if you are not listening to your users, it might not be used in the way it was intended to be used.”
David Raths is a freelance writer based in Philadelphia.
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | March/April 2019