(Denise Gaspard-Richards) Thank you and good afternoon, everyone.
It's a long title and there's just two things I need to say before I begin.
The wrap-around model of content development:
I know today a number of instructional designers, learning, business
who are involved in working with design and courses.
This is not like the ADDIE model
or anything that we use for instructional design.
This is really a model that allows us to design course materials
wrapped around open education resources.
So it reduces the need for students to purchase textbooks
and also reduces their cost, because in the Caribbean, which I have
-- does this work? Yeah? No, I'm pointing.
Okay, how do I go forward, how do I go forward to the slide again?
(Off voice, inaudible)
(DGR) Oh it's there now, okay, great. Great, alright thank you --
So you'll see a map, it's easier for me to look down than to look up.
You'll see a map here of the Caribbean and you will note
that I have tried to identify where we are located:
there is a little block on the map, to the right.
That shows you where we are in relation to the rest of the world.
So, North America would be up to the left and Europe will be over to the right.
Okay, so these are the islands where we have the orange lines.
Those are the islands that comprise the Open Campus,
I just need to tell you that.
So you'll see that they're small, we're scattered.
Our economies are fledgling economies, we're developing countries,
we're developing islands, so cost is a very important element for us
when we are looking at students and getting them into our campus.
Our campus also is not funded by governments, because, of course
they are also dealing with challenges.
So we're very much dependent on student fee income.
We can't charge a very high fee to come into our courses,
so we have to keep costs down.
So hence, open educational resources and our wrap-around concept.
So, if we can just go to the next slide-- I'm not comfortable with
using this at all. I'm sorry, can you help me
moving to the slides?
Thank you very much.
Okay, so the project, wrap-around,
which is content and support.
Content and support is really where we were before 2014.
Content and support really looks at us designing course materials,
working with course developers who are subject matter experts,
so we work with them independently.
So an instructional designer, if that person is assigned to
work on developing courses in the program,
if you take a Bachelor's program, that's about 30 courses, and
they would be working with 30 subject matter specialists.
We try to break it up, look at the courses by levels,
so they're maybe working with 5 to 10 courses at any one time.
They were working individually with these persons, so the benefits
of all of the training and all of the experience was just going one to one.
Then of course, you have multimedia designers
who would be working with our content, and again that would be one to one.
So you're not getting the benefit of a team kind of effort.
So we realize that there were issues that we needed to look at.
One of the things that reversed was the strategy for
the academic division.
We were no longer able to sustain such a model,
we had to produce content very rapidly and we had to find a way
to make this work.
So what we did there is we looked at process, using
a project management process, and we by chance, we happened upon
the agile design model.
That allowed us now to bring our teams together.
So all of our content experts who are working in a particular program,
if we are working on, let's say, on courses,
they can all be together in an online environment working collaboratively,
so that they're sharing, they're knowing what each other's doing.
So that you find that the courses can be sequential, there's no overlapping
because everybody knows what everybody else is doing and we are following
a particular plan.
So we recognized that that needed to happen and we started that process of
moving and transitioning.
Of course, there are implications there for the departmental operations,
we are looking at working differently with content persons,
we are looking at our instructional designers, working differently to support
these individuals.
And of course, there is an impact on our production teams to produce materials.
So we found that it was easier now to design our learning activities
around that content because we had everybody collaboratively together.
We thought it would be a good idea to move lessons into that way of thinking.
So if I can go quickly to the agile learning design slide, please.
Thank you.
So, Jasmine was just talking about some of the characteristics when you
look at agile learning and particularly with recognizing that there's an
opportunity to be collaborative.
There was also an opportunity for us to work in an iterative manner.
We also recognize that we could be flexible with the model,
we could be very creative in what we did in terms of helping our subject matter
experts to design authentic learning activities.
We could be very responsive because if we are working
in a project management kind of environment,
we can respond very quickly to things that need to be changed.
And of course, we had to be very lean because we are talking about developing
a number of courses in a short space of time and we need to do things
in a very clean and clinical manner, so that we can move ahead very, very
quickly.
Some of these support strategies that we had to use was of course,
we had to have an emphasis on cross-functionality.
We could not just operate one on one, so we had to look at
bringing all the members of a particular team together.
We had to have an emphasis on interactions,
people had to be able, they had to feel very comfortable.
We are in an online environment, as I showed you in a map,
we are scattered, so your content expert could be in Germany,
your content expert could be in Canada, anywhere.
And I am leading the team, I am based in Trinidad.
Some of my instructional designers are in another island in Jamaica, in another
island in Barbados, so we all over the place.
So we really needed to be able to interact in a way that brought meaning
to what we were doing.
Also, we want to have usable deliverables. we don't want to just
design content and when it goes into the learning environment it's not meaningful
to the students, it's not meaningful to the persons who are leading the courses.
We also looked at emphasis on rapid and decisive response to change intiatives.
People are very, you know, change is very difficult for most of us,
for all of us.
And you had people who were working in a particular way over a period
of many years, and now you're asking, "Listen, we are in a change environment,
this is how we are going to be looking at design and content,"
and you found that there are persons who just could just not step up to the plate.
But, we were already in that situation, so the head honcho had to hold their
hands and pull people along, it was very, very painful.
And the head honcho had to actually do some of the work in the end
so that when the time came for the course to be delivered, there was something that
was available to go into our learning environment.
So we had to keep, you know, a kind of process going that was
very, very, very, very quick.
We depended on a lot on templates because there was no other way to get
it done and to ensure that we could do it in the time frame that we needed to
because we looked at a four month period for design, development, and review
of an entire course, and you're talking about more than 30 courses.
And in our first phase of development, we were doing something like 57 courses,
so it was a bit crazy if you could think of it like that.
So let's look at some views from the literature very quickly with regard to agile.
The key features for our department staff: rapid, responsive, targeted approaches,
and lean, so very much a project management approach to what
we needed to do.
And we found that persons were not, they were not really prepared for
that change.
They wanted to stay in the old environment and do what they were doing
because they were comfortable,
and now you had somebody looking over their shoulder.
One of the other things was that, as the head of department, I could not
see everything because everybody was doing it in their little corner.
So I could not actually see what was happening.
Now, we are in the online environment, we are collaborative,
I am in there and I am looking at everything, and I can
comment on everything, and I can say, "No, this is not working the way
it should be. Look back at these learning objectives,
how are you going to measure that?
You know, that does not go together, you need to re-look this."
That wasn't happening before because
I couldn't see it.
So suddenly, there they had somebody in their face all the time in the online
environment managing that process and trying to bring it to where we needed it
to be.
So this is one of the things that we learn from Miles, that "Agile learning: living with
the speed of change," that's in an international journal,
that the key finding that Miles found when they looked at this view from the literature
in a management setting, is that a majority of employees see their
colleagues as a more valuable resource for acquiring new skills or knowledge than
their internal learning management systems,
and I wanted to be able to apply that to what was happening in our environment.
In terms of a learner-centric view,
the key features for learners, because ultimately we're developing courses for
use by our learners, so we had to factor that in,
we had to ensure that our courses
had some real-world relevance, that there would be some flexibility,
both in terms of the learning styles that the students would be able to use and in
terms of the types of resources that we're able to provide for them and
also that they can go look for for themselves using the kinds of guidelines
that are there in the materials.
We also had to be very nimble
in terms of preparing our courses for the students and, of course,
twenty-first century skills.
Those were just so critical,
and it's something that we hadn't concentrated on before,
so this was an opportunity to bring in, you know, go digital, look at the kinds
of multimedia communication skills that we wanted to develop in our students,
critical thinking skills, innovative-ness, all of these things we had to ensure
would have been included
in the courses we were designing.
So if we move now to project center--
how am I doing for time? I'm okay?
Yes? Great.
All right, so the key elements that we thought that we needed to have for
the success of our project and moving our course development into this flexible
and dynamic kind of environment is, of course, that we wanted to be iterative,
that we wanted to be collaborative,
we wanted to have creative opportunities available because if you're talking about
project management, you're talking about being very rigid and moving things along
in a particular way, but we recognized that we had to do differently.
So in terms of what was happening in the courses,
while we had the courses development cycles structured in such a way where
they would have to develop a course outline, then they would have to
do a course plan that would give all of
the elements of what we were going to include in the course materials,
and then of course, the design, the course
materials using the wrap-around concept.
We realized that it, it could not be a linear thing, it could not be just
move from one directly into the other,
so while we had a course outline and they worked on the course plan,
when they were working on the course plan,
we would realize that there were things needed to change, go back, look at your
course outline, then you move on,
you continue on with your materials,
as you're doing your materials, you realize that there are some resources
that you really need to include, so you have to keep going back.
So that meant that we had to be meeting constantly, so we were working through
weekly meetings trying to figure out
what were the problems,
if there were any, what we needed to change,
what we needed to do and continue on in that type of process.
Of course, working together in the
online environment.
Why, there's another slide here, I'm not going to go into it.
What I want to do is go into the next slide which really shows, you know
for the student this is why we were doing what we were doing.
We wanted students to be able to move from a point where they could filter
information, they could select
information, so they could know what they would be practicing when they
get into the real world.
They would have to be able to integrate information because of course
we want them to be able to use
whatever we are providing in that
material and provide them with that kind
of authentic experience that we want,
and of course, for them to figure out
what have I learned and how will I be using this new knowledge and skills I have
developed in a real-world environment,
so there's a lot of authenticity going
on here.
So next slide quickly.
How we did it, as I said,
we talked through our process that we used
prior to 2014, and there were a number of processes that we used prior to 2014,
so we consolidated, we re-engineered,
we had a number of templates that were designed,
we revised all of our protocols,
and of course, we redesigned our collaborative work spaces.
So we work right now in a environment,
where we have everybody interacting
just as the students would if they're using the learning management system.
The project management approach: we had targets, we looked at a re-assessment,
we had those weekly meetings,
we always had debriefings at the end of each stage,
and of course, we had to have some contingencies in place.
And what our outcomes were, human performance, of course,
you have the departmental leadership,
you know, had to look at how I worked,
what kind of leadership I brought to them,
and we interrogated that.
How effective were the teams in that process, we have interrogated that.
Our processes, we have done that.
And what kinds of lessons have we learned?
We are still finding ourselves
in a situation where some of our
multimedia requests are not linked to
generative strategies of learning.
We need to focus more on quality,
on learning activities to recognize that,
and we need to have all of this linked to recall integration, organization, and
elaboration strategies throughout project implementation.
So whatever we do in terms of the development,
we have to use these kinds of strategies
to help our students over the line.
Okay, and I think I end here.
Thank you.
(Emcee) Okay, thank you.
That was a marathon.