The Course Development Process

One of the larger bodies of work that the Online Programs Team is to develop a sustainable process for course development. As we look towards scaling up our efforts we have found that a lot of our practices and processes have had to evolve and change over time. Designing a single course is quite different to designing a program of 24.

With that in mind the team have been developing and iterating on our processes over the last 18 months and while there are still refinements to be made the approach is now feeling stable and scalable. The following outlines each of the key stages in the processes and outlines the key outputs and information generated at each stage.

1. Discovery

The Discovery stage kicks off the process and we introduce ourselves and the way we work to our course authors. The aim of this stage is for the learning design team to gain an understanding the existing course and to begin to identify areas that require change and development.

The learning designer will have access to previous versions of the course and will explore the existing content available and textbook. This in many ways acts as an audit of the course and allows you to form a picture of the course. This picture forms the Course Catalogue which contains information about the current assessments, the topics covered in the course, the kinds of interactions with students, what is covered in lectures, slides and readings. This helps build your understanding of the course you will be working on and the kinds of questions you might want to ask the Course Coordinator.

The Course Coordinator is the person who has taught the course previously and may be different from the Course Author that has been assigned. It is important to conduct the Coordinator Interview with the person who has had experience in teaching the course as you will want to discuss with them what issues might there exist, what changes or improvements would they make and what areas of the course that students struggle with.

The interview and your catalogue will help to finalise a Course Report, a consolidated plan for developing the course. The report should outline any issues or concerns, the difficulty of the task ahead and suggestions for change. This is a good point for some peer review and feedback on your work and get any suggestions from the team to take into the next stage.

2. Co-create

The co-creation phase is where a lot of the design work takes place. The aim of this phase is to set up the main parameters of the course and to map out what it will look like over its duration. A couple of important steps take place during this phase.

The first step is assessment design. The aim here is to discuss the alignment of assessments to the learning outcomes and to plan out the tasks and activities students will undertake. To achieve this it is useful to think of assessments as evidence or proof that the students can demonstrate those learning outcomes. You role is to ensure that the evidence is robust and clearly demonstrates that the student has met the expected threshold to pass. The discussions around assessment should bring clarity to:

This work culminates in the development of the Assessment Briefs document. At this point in time they may not be 100% complete (dates of submission and the full marking rubric may be missing), but they should be in a state that they can inform the next step in the process – the Course Map.

The Course Map is the development of clear and concise map of the course across its duration. The first step is to mark out the Assessments and when they will occur which should include a start and end date. The next step is to map out the topics across the weeks. These will usually come across from the Course Catalogue. There may be a need to move and change the sequence of topics throughout this process and it is why we use a tool like Miro to carry out this step. The course map also provides an opportunity to introduce the Activity Types to the course author as a way of starting to map out what the experience might look like week-to-week. This can be done in a simple way by using them to map out the time-on-task for each week and marking off how long they wish students to spend on each type of activity over the week. A typical study load for a trimester is 13 hours/week.

One of the challenging parts of the Course Map is the process of moving from Topics to Lessons. This part of the process is essentially working with the course author to convert the topics into addressable questions. This entails breaking it down a topic into What, How, Why, Who and Where questions. At an early stage this can seem a bit cumbersome but this work assists in defining what the course really needs to cover. Some of the lessons may merge as you work your way through this process but by the end of the step you will have 12 weeks of the course mapped out with a clear idea of the assessment process and a rough idea of the activities students will be doing each week. If it's possible to add activities, resources from the catalogue, ideas you have for discussions, practice items and review points - add them into the map. Using the colour coding it will be easy to check if there are missing activity types (and hence types of learning), which can help facilitate discussions and additions to the course as you go.

At the end of this stage is another opportunity for peer review and discussion about the course. You should feel comfortable with presenting this back to the team and getting feedback on the proposed course.

3. Development

The development stage is where most of the work in the course takes place. This stage is the development of the full course as a storyboard prior to being built and include developing content for lessons, activities, media and interactives.

The team have been able to develop up a new tool to streamline this process in a number of key areas, hence the Smart Storyboard. Once your Course Map is complete Lessons can be added to Modules in the Smart Storyboard. Each Lesson can then be worked on and fleshed out via a conversation with the Course Author to get them familiar with the tool and the process. Each Lesson is made up of modular Blocks and each one of these can be associated with an Activity Type, and also a Learning Patterns. The framing text and explanation of each learning pattern is then available to the course author within the tool itself.

The tool itself is designed to be used iteratively. The first time around you may just want to plan out the learning sequence of the Lesson, so you may just insert a single Content block with a few dot points, followed a External Resource with a link to the textbook, then another Content block that contains an example of what they just read followed up by an Interactive block where students share an example they have found. Each of these can then be assigned to the relevant person, developed further at which point those Content blocks might be better broken up as you're able to define seperate patterns and it may benefit from adding in a Definition and Worked example pattern.

The ability to assign blocks, comment, add media and readings into the course helps to communicate with the other teams (Projects and Media Production) and helps to provide clarity to you Course Author as to what they are required to do. The tool has the ability to provide useful status and progress updates as well and will help to provide a more nuanced understanding of the course and how it is progressing.

4. Build

During the build stage most of the technical work is handled by the Media Production team, but there are roles for the Learning Designer throughout. This includes working with the course author on videos, working with them in studio and assisting in the editing and final transcripts. The course will be created in MyUni (canvas) alongside all visual elements and media.

5. Review

The review stage has students and faculty review the course in platform, fixing any errors that are encountered as well as performing our own quality assurance processes before final signoff.