Searching (2018)

Today I rewatched the 2018 film ‘Searching’ directed by Aneesh Chaganty. The movie is worth a watch just for the way it is filmed. All the shorts are through the desktop of the main character’s computer, with the story told through video calls, text messages, web searches, and the occasional TV news report. It sounds like it would not work, but it does, partly down to the excellent editing.

The exciting thing about this film is how much you can do with your computer if you set up a link between your phone and laptop. The main character approaches the investigation into his daughter’s disappearance like a ninja project manager. He starts by creating a table with questions that he then goes through each of his daughters 96 Facebook friends completing a row for each. He goes through search history, social media accounts, text messages, and email, meticulously logging everything he learns and gradually finding clues to create a timeline of the days running up to the disappearance.

The situation in the film is extreme, but it showcases how much of the world’s information is online and how a computer can aid a systematic approach to solve a problem. It raises the question about how much more productive you might be if you learned to use your computer better and how methodical you are in your approach and documentation when problem-solving.

Two tasks for me this week:

Become a power user with my computer
Be deliberate in my approach and documentation in my problem-solving.

How would you go about becoming an expert at designing online learning?

I read a tweet this morning that asked; if you could be in the 1% of experts for any skill, what would that be? I have been building my skills in the design of online learning for several years, so it got me thinking about what expertise looks like in my field. I wrote the following question at the top of a page and started to make a list.

How would you go about becoming an expert at designing online learning?

Here are my steps to developing expertise in the design of online and blended learning courses. If you have questions or what to add to the list, message me on Twitter.

Follow a documented set of learning and design principles
Develop a model for estimating effort and costs
Follow a repeatable development process
Know the fundamentals of project management and follow them religiously
Treat the course creator like the hero of the story, support them and collaborate.
Have a Quality Assurance process linked to the design principles
Set clear expectations for students, create metrics to monitor against these, and have interventions in place when they are not met.
Collect and analyse lots of data and user feedback
Iterate, iterate, iterate
Frequently update your learning and design principles, costing model, and development process

Notes: Firstly, I have explicitly focused on the design of courses and separated this from the very different development and delivery skills. Secondly, I have taken some liberties by putting all the learning and design principles into a single step. These two areas are vast and cover everything from accessibility and user experience to psychology and learning and teaching models. Thirdly, within the third step of following the development process, I currently prefer to use the rapid prototyping model that follows the Design thinking steps, including the creation of student personas, and UCL’s ABC workshop for mapping out the course. Finally, this is the first attempt at a list, and I might wake up tomorrow and realise I have missed a whole section of the field and need to update this list. If you are in the area already or are interested in developing your expertise, then I hope this list is useful.

If you have questions or want to add to the list, message me on Twitter. I would love to see other peoples lists for building expertise in the design of online courses too.

Project Management Basics

The first step towards a mature development process for developing online courses is to introduce some project management basics. According to the Project Management Institute, a project is a temporary endeavour undertaken to create a unique product, service or result. For a set of tasks to be a project, there must be a start and end date and produce a one-off output. The three core tasks for managing a project are cost and effort estimation, task allocation, and risk management.

Resist the ad hoc. Announce that this is a project, and that it matters enough to be treated as one.
Seth Godin

Here are ten suggested actions to get you started with managing your projects:

Set a start and end date and identify your critical path; each task’s last possible completion date allows the project to hit the end date. Identify the dates by work backwards from completion and take into account tasks dependent on the completion of another. Track task completion against this critical path, and do what is needed to hit all the deadlines, so the project ends on time.
Develop a way of estimating the cost and effort involved in your projects. Understand how complexity, size, and reuse impact these estimates. Start with what you can find in literature and then review and update it after each new project is complete to improve its accuracy over time.
Keep a list of risks, possible consequences, and likelihood and introduce ways to reduce the chance of them happening to minimise disturbances during the project. Considered project risks that affect the schedule or resources, product risks affecting the final course or module, and business risks that affect the university.
Assign a Project Leader responsible for the project; this should be someone who controls the critical resources such as the Academics line manager of Head of Department. Regularly communicate with the Project Lead and get sign-off from them on crucial decisions.
Produce a project schedule that includes all the tasks to be completed and their due dates, any key milestones, and gates where the key project team members get sign-off to progress. Add the critical path and start and end dates and get everyone to sign it off before work begins. Update it as things change.
Send out weekly project highlights to the Sponsor/owner and Project Leader. Use a traffic light system to help them identify if they need to intervene. If in amber or red, add a brief note saying why it is in trouble and what is required to bring it back to green.
Make all your work visible and share it will the whole project team. Show the critical path, the estimates, the risks, and the schedule. Keep a record of all the weekly highlight reports and the other documents in a central location that the project team can access. Produce regular prototypes in various forms as soon as possible and regularly afterwards, share it with the intended students for feedback before the course launches.
Write down everything. Record everything that people expect and everything that people promise. Let everyone know you have recorded it. Keep a log of what you’ve done and how. You will need it when things go wrong or when planning the next project.
When working on multiple projects, keep a complete list in one place. Use the weekly highlights traffic light system and record the next action to move each forward. If you manage a team, get the members to do the same and keep a central list of all the projects and their status.
Evaluate your projects when you sign them off. Create a lessons learned document and get the project team to list what worked and what didn’t. Integrate any changes into the process for next time.

CMM and online learning development process design

Universities need to significantly increase their capacity to develop high quality online and blended delivery through the recruitment and training of Learning Designers. Institutional scale requires a shift from focusing on individual Learning Designers’ capabilities to concentrating on the organisation’s capabilities for designing learning. First, universities must consider how Learning Design projects are managed and implement sound project management principles. Next, they need to implement a structured development approach through research, evaluation, and peer review, the creation of rigorous quality standards, a formalised development pipeline, a strong community of practice, and progressive professional development.

Good project management of course design and development projects keeps them delivered on time, on budget, and within scope, and ensure a high standard for the student experience. Most learning development models are in their infancy, with few standards defined. If institutions want to produce novel and innovative online courses, they need to borrow design and development techniques from other fields, including software engineering.

The Capability Maturity Model (CMM), developed at the Carnegie Mellon University for large software projects, evaluates a product development processes level of maturity. It is focused on standardising the process of design and development and so counter to many agile methods but will work well with established teams in large organisations. CMM accepts that design and development processes are idealistic and do not represent most projects’ messy and improvised nature, but that tightly controlled and fully documented processes are better. The messiness level varies from project to project, and CMM aims to categories these into five levels of maturity.

Learning Design teams can use CCM’s five levels to improve their operations and assess how individual Learning Designers perform. Teams work through the levels in sequence to standardise their process to produce consistently high-quality online courses no matter the team working on it. The highest level would be represented by a clearly defined process that can be taught and learned, with clear quality metrics that lead to near-zero adverse outcomes. It includes mechanisms for capturing innovative practice and incrementally improving with each course iteration.

The five stages of maturity

All stages above level two subsume the standards of the previous level.

Level 1: Initial – an ad hoc process which can be chaotic. Each Learning Designer follows their version of a basic process. This is the starting point for using a new or undocumented repeat process.

Level 2: Repeatable – each project includes cost scheduling and basic project management practices. Some processes are repeatable, with some consistent results.

Level 3: Defined – the process for managing and developing courses is standardised and documented.

Level 4: Managed – measurement is made of the process and course quality. These measures are used to control and improve practices. Effective achievement of the process objectives can be evidenced using metrics.

Level 5: Optimising – processes are continually improved through quantitative measures and testing innovative ideas and new technologies. (Few developers are considered to be at this level).

The next three to five years will see massive growth in online learning, and universities core delivery will keep much of the changes they have implemented over the last ten months. Departments responsible for supporting online and blended learning should be spending time now on process improvement to optimise their design and development model to prepare for this rapid growth.

Get in touch with me on Twitter if you want to discuss the process of design and development of online learning.