Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 57 seconds
I am very proud of this work I did with Daniela Gachago and Nicola Pallitt (thank you both for inviting me to be part of this team!). I am proud of how we used collaborative autoethnography to help build towards theory that resulted in a framework, which I can imagine other people using as they work on designing their own online courses for PD, something I am sure many are working on these days, including my own department!
The framework is built specifically for PD courses for faculty, but I think may be useful as a spring board for other contexts. But our main point is to lay these dimensions out as design considerations and not as a way to judge a design. Just a way to ensure you are considering all the options and how it all melds together – does it make sense, have you considered how shifting something along one axis might affect the course experience? How does changing one dimension affect another? We don’t answer those questions, but looking at it visually seems to help us think more clearly about what it is we are doing and how we have designed it. Here is an example of our framework applied to the three courses we were researching (which themselves informed the creation of the framework):
[note, I cannot create alt text for some reason, maybe because I copy/pasted the below? So I’ll describe it real quick. The diagram below is from Gachago, Pallitt & Bali, 2020, paper that’s published in the NLC2020 proceedings. It shows how the design of an online or blended PD experience can vary along several dimensions, e.g. open/closed, unfacilitated/facilitated, uncertifiied/certified, process centric/content centric and so on. The full paper describes each of the dimensions visually and in more detail in a table]
As you look at the framework, please let us know in the comments or on Twitter or whatever… if you think this framework can be useful for you, or if you feel there is an important dimension missing, for example, that is an important design element.
Today, I presented this with Daniela Gachago and Nicola Pallitt, and I wanted to share here for folks who aren’t following the #NLC2020 conference. It’s free… why aren’t you following it? Just kidding! I know it’s a busy time for most of us. Actually, I want to admit something really strange for me. I have not done a presentation while needing to look at notes or even make notes for myself since… I was maybe 10 years old. But my pandemic brain was muddled. We had submitted the final draft of this paper in Jan or Feb and I remembered it very little, even after I had discussed it with my co-authors to prep for the presentation, and even after I shared the framework with my boss as a possible thing to help us design things internally. Ah well. I think the session went well despite some tech issues (this has happened throughout the conference, which is normal, but thankfully has not been too disruptive… the advantage of co-authors is that not all of us dropped out at the same time!)
So here is the paper that’s published in the proceedings.
Because our methodology is Collaborative Autoethnography, our original narratives for this project were too long for the final paper, and so we are also sharing an earlier draft that has those details at: https://bit.ly/NoSizeFitsAll
And our slides are at:
And embedded below:
Loved your presentation, @Bali_Maha !