Building New Worlds Together: Creating Interactive Online Programs with Unique Design and Creative Leadership
Workshop Session 2
Brief Abstract
How do you engage your learners? How do you convince faculty to embrace change? Will your school's leadership take risks? You need to continue to evolve in how you approach design and leadership. This workshop will focus on joining both design and leadership decisions in online program development.
Presenters
Extended Abstract
For over 20 years, schools have struggled with the ideas of "interactivity" or "engagement". They are such vague terms for the learner and even for leader’s struggle take the risk on investing in high quality course development. At the same time, schools often see a disconnect between instructional designers, faculty, and school leaders. These three groups aren't mutually exclusive to the conversation of creating the ideal learning experience. Leadership decision and instructional design decisions are often treated as separate things rather than a singular team looking to make the best possible learning experience. Why is that? Why can't designers, faculty, and leaders sit in a room and decide what's best for the school and/or a specific academic program?
The Katz School of Science and Health at Yeshiva University recently invested consider time and resources in...all honesty...taking a risk on building an interactive and engaging development. The M.S. in Speech-Language Pathology wanted to go online, but also wanted to develop a learning experience that would be uniform across both online and on-campus courses, while embracing interactivity and high-quality production. After over two years of development, we learned many things and put together a process that balances both leadership and design in near three dozen interactive courses.
This workshop will explore three different angles of this process:
- Part 1: History of project – Born during the dark days of COVID-19 and a need for adapting to high demand of SLP education.
- Part 2: Leadership decisions – The difficult road of convincing senior leaders to invest in online resources, including but not limited to: technology, staff, and release time for faculty.
- Part 3: Participation – This segment will focus on group activities to look at both the design and leadership elements of developing an interactive online program.
Note: Part 1 and Part 2 will be brief while Part 3 will take up most of the workshop.
Plan for interactivity:
Using the model developed for the Speech-Language Pathology (SLP) program at the Katz School of Science and Health, we’d like to enlist you all as participants in a mock run-through of the entire process, while connecting and uniting each of you in your respective roles as faculty, instructional designers, videographers, technologists, leaders in teaching and learning and academia, to achieve the following two session goals.
- To allow each of you to experience the convolution of dynamics typically encountered when trying to advance to an important educational milestone with multiple stakeholders with diverse responsibilities, and
- To take advantage of your creativity and expertise to suggest ways to improve the model for future use.
During this interactive roleplay we will share and brainstorm:
1. Challenges we faced and solutions we implemented.
2. Templates and techniques used for gathering important content from SMEs.
3. Suggested ways to engage SMEs, school administrators.
4. Technologies used to simplify the process.
5. Technologies used for instructional design.
6. Design considerations for interactive modules
7. Design considerations for an LMS like Canvas
How you’ll Participate:
With the history of our process and model already outlined the attendees and presenters will split into three groups.
1. Faculty—SMEs and department heads
2. Leadership —Finance/budgetary/Dean(s)/Directors
3. Teaching & Learning Professionals—Instructional Designers, videographers, photographers