Intro:
After developing a small forest worth of paper process documents, templates, and guidelines for working with the curriculum development team at CCDE we finally decided to put this information in an easy to access and update, website. WordPress was chosen for it’s simplicity, robustness, and diversity. I built not only a home for the documents we’d created, but a place for faculty who were unfamiliar with CCDE, online teaching, and the process of instructional design to become familiar with it before sitting down at our first kickstart meeting.
The Format:
An institutional install of WordPress provided the platform to build a simple place to send faculty, departments, deans, and instructors to in order to discover our process for curriculum development and to get a sense of how a development works. This website was intended to answer many of the frequently asked questions about our development process and get the departmental stakeholders comfortable with what questions to ask before meeting us face-to-face. We started by provided a quick overview of the guiding Instructional Design Principles that guide our work, a dipity timeline illustrating our development process and the timelines that we typically adhere to, and an overview of the development team including the IDs, Curriculum assistants, Instructional technology coordinator, and the copyright coordinators along with the roles and responsibilities of each. This gives faculty a good sense of the supports in place to help them through the development. Beyond this we also showcased many samples of the various distributed delivery modes CCDE works in including online, televised, video-conference, and print.
The Results:
Faculty and deans are better informed about the process and expectations around curriculum development and have commented that they’ve returned to the website for guidance in their face-to-face developments as well. Providing these processes, roles and responsibilities, and templates up front allows the SME (especially a first timer) the confidence to join the team and to better understand their role and the supports in place to help them realize a quality learning experience. This site has continued to grow and now includes some videos of their own colleagues discussing their first time online teaching experiences and also showcases a page of quotes form our SME’s that highlight their experiences working with the CCDE Curriculum Development team.
Deliverables:
Here is a link to the Distributed Learning & Technology Website for CCDE.
