Abstract
As the number of online courses increase in higher education, many higher education institutions outsource online course development to an Online Program Management (OPM) provider because of a lack of budget, staff, and technology. Current research indicates that OPM providers often do not have instructional design (ID) services tailored to a specific university. This research uses a case study to analyze a business partnership between a research university and an OPM provider. The Activity Theory conceptual framework was used to direct inquiry and analysis. Results show a miss of the “Empathize” (first stage of Design Thinking) phase in the project management approach from the OPM provider side, which made the process appear more like a start-up company and caused some faculty to lose motivation about the instructional design process. A complete Design Thinking approach from the OPM provider and the university partner are very important to reap the most benefits from this relationship.
Highlights
As the number of online courses increase in higher education, many higher education institutions outsource online course development to an Online Program Management (OPM) provider because of a lack of budget, staff, and technology
This paper presents a case study that describes the interactions between the faculty at a research university, an online program management provider (OPM), and one instructional design firm that was outsourced by the OPM
This was because OPM and R University did not take enough time to understand faculty motivations, why the faculty were participating in this process, what their current knowledge and experience with regards to online teaching were, what their personal circumstances were, and so forth
Summary
As the number of online courses increase in higher education, many higher education institutions outsource online course development to an Online Program Management (OPM) provider because of a lack of budget, staff, and technology. This paper presents a case study that describes the interactions between the faculty at a research university, an online program management provider (OPM), and one instructional design firm that was outsourced by the OPM. Online learning uses a different platform, builds communities in different ways, demands different pedagogies, and requires different choices for curriculum as compared to face-to-face courses and programs (Morris & Stommel, 2016) They require more effective teaching principles and practices so that students do not get overwhelmed or experience excessive cognitive load. Online teachers are faced with new pedagogical issues including student interactions, course content design and delivery, multiple levels of communication, new types of assignments and performance expectations, and different sets of assessments and evaluation techniques (Boling et al, 2012) The penultimate section of the paper presents the data analysis, and the final section summarizes the conclusions and presents the practical and academic implications of the study
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