Instructional Design: Design & Development Process

What happens at the Kickoff meeting?

The Kickoff meeting ‘launches’ the course design and development process. Several outcomes are decided and delivered, like: determining the Eight Dates, determining the review participants and initiating that recruitment effort, and a discussion and explanation around the Learning Environment Modeling Language.

Who attends the kickoff meeting?

Typically all known stakeholders (program leads, department chairs, administrators, etc) are invited to the kickoff meeting. Likely, not everyone will attend, but the invitation is offered.

What are the Eight Dates?

At the Kickoff meeting, we will set the big Eight Dates. Those are dates when big deliverables or milestone events happen (i.e., Architecture Final Draft Due, Course Rollover, Course Handoff, etc). We will likely set them backward, setting the official course handoff date first, and working backward from there.

What is the Course Design and Development Process?

The process is different for every course lead and every course. It’s different because people are different and so are their courses. Some courses have lots of content that need to be sorted, others have lots of content that need to be developed. What is the same, are the five main phases of design and development (although they might happen more quickly or slowly depending on the course and the course lead).

The first is the Kickoff meeting, followed by the Course Design Architecture phase. That can go quickly or slowly depending on a variety of factors (current course design, course lead decision making, review feedback, etc.). After the LEML architecture has been decided, we then begin to design and gather content. This phase is called Course Design Content. The content populates a blueprint, as well as faculty introductions and colloquial (but professional) language.

Once the blueprint is reviewed and feedback incorporated, the Course Build begins. This is mainly when the AT team takes over and builds out the course site according to the design considerations previously discussed. During that Build process, the course is debugged for errors (re a Bug-Bash) and rolled over into its official home for the upcoming semester (official Albert-listed course site).

What is the Learning Environment Modeling Language (LEML)?

The LEML was created by instructional designers from the University of Central Oklahoma. Essentially, it is a visual toolkit for communicating and representing instructional design ideas and plans. LEML as a framework consists of a set of symbols, each with a defined meaning, that can be assembled together to represent information about the design of learning environments. We’ll interact with LEML during our course design meetings and the final output of the Architecture phase will be a completed LEML Architecture draft.