Being the writer, designer and a primary facilitator for the orientation courses for our university’s associate and bachelor courses has given me a wonderful opportunity to continually and iteratively improve the quality of the course for both student learning and faculty effectiveness. I note faculty effectiveness as crucial for any course design because student learning cannot be maximized if the faculty are overwhelmed with busy grading. If there is nothing else to justify curriculum designers, it is this balance of learner centered training and faculty guidance that is so important. I recently posted about my experience in systemic repair of the bachelor orientation course; this is about the associate orientation course. The success skills of adult learners are unique from traditional university because of the career, family, and hopefully some personal life that must be juggled along with the need for education made relevant to their experiences and constructive learning. Thus time consciousness (I dislike management used in this context) is an essential component that is addressed in the course. …read more

Scott Marsee, my lead instructional designer, and I were fortunate in our networking at the ASTD 2012 conference this past January with our introduction to Dr. Steven Villachica, a tenured associate professor at Boise State University’s School of Engineering. He is currently teaching an advanced instructional design course for master level students, and when he heard of our successful agile curriculum design techniques, asked if we would present a webinar to his students. This was a wonderful opportunity to get our success story out as the webinar would also posted in their public repository, and an honor to be case studied by the students. …read more

There is a certain amount of pride that I have with our current curriculum development process in that it is very systemic to reduce conflicting information and formatting across courses as well as addressing academic rigor necessary for a top quality degree programme. However, there are several levels of system resolutions available for curriculum design, including the facilitator level. We have started developing communities of practice to represent each expertise area so that while faculty cannot physically change the curriculum without advising the online design team, they have strong ownership in the content level of the course that designers cannot manage simply because they are not expert at these levels of subject matter. Already we have seen great recommendations to improve curriculum that has resulted in major changes for four courses, including one course that has an entirely different resource now. I am most anxious to see how this plays out over a period of time across student evaluations as not so ironically, students and faculty noted issues in the same things; a clear signal that a system needed to be put into place to address these problems. Wonderfully, the faculty communities are finding more than problems, but also ways to improve the course in ways that students would not be able to identify, even if told, but have an improved learning experience as a result. …read more

This is my call for help! As a doctoral student, one of my passions is lean and agile practices in academics both as a curriculum designer and higher education administrator. I am hopeful that my dissertation will be the qualitative exploration of links between agile intentionality and sustainability in curriculum, instruction, and assessment. A lead-up into this dissertation planning is a major thesis on systems in academics, with a strong focus on lean and social systems. In fact, the application (project) aspect of this thesis is the process development of agile curriculum design that I presented at Agile 2011. Thankfully, I was able to provide journal support to the project through my publication in the conference proceedings. However, there is something a bit unsatisfying in constantly self-citation because a researcher wants to find other support for the project. However, the bottom line is that I could find no other agile work in formal academic curriculum design. …read more

Having both worked in a cube farm and remotely from home, reflection of the types of interruptions and ways to mitigate them are completely different for each environment. Regardless of the environment, however, the question is how to be effective in an interruption-rich environment…which, by the way, is pretty much everywhere given social media, smart phones and tablets at constant arms reach. My discovery has been to not fight the situation in order to put into place what I assume will work for me, but make a better observation of my reality and create unique solutions for becoming effective, keeping in mind the value of continuous improvement. …read more

The word deadline is an ugly one. Creativity and innovation, in my experience, come from my free moments when I do not have the black cloud of deadline over me. Either that or the deadline is so upon me that I have to come up with an innovation in order to make it in the first place because I procrastinated so magnificently. However, the stress involved with that type of innovation usually results in post-success distraction due to either celebration or exhaustion, thus killing productivity for quite awhile. Bottom line, unlike a favourite quip of “I’m just practicing JIT”, the meaning of JIT is not about managing deadlines and certainly is construed in every possible element when referenced in this manner. I feel physical pain when hearing an excuse that is clearly intended to cover the fact that the deadline was blown off to the 11^th hour. …read more

The attendance of this conference provided a great deal of perspective of the direction for our university’s online team and curriculum in the crucial next year or so as we realize a new growth through our two new masters degrees and now bachelors of science in nursing for current RNs. Undergraduate degrees have become patterned for us to develop quickly, but the BSN-RN provides a new challenge with a special practicing field that has an audience with much more specific expectations and needs than general degrees. With new concentrations popping up everywhere, a transition to a new learning management system, and a new approach for motivating and engaging adjunct faculty, there was a lot on both of our minds. (Both refers to myself as director of online education and Scott as lead instructional designer of the online programs at Ohio Christian University.)

The bottom line is that we walked away excited, freaked, and motivated to bring our programs to a new level of effective design and delivery methods for our learners and faculty. Here are some of the major takaways I found in sessions.

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A challenge to every speaking experience is to reach your audience. We create buzz words and phrases, images, and other artifacts to ensure that the message is clear, but cross-industry communication is challenging. As an educator, I am in a unique position of applying agile methodology to formal academia both as an administrator and in the curriculum design process. This unique position is that the Agile community knows little to nothing of my efforts in formal education while formal education knows little to nothing of my efforts with Agile. Thus, my goal was to present my experiences in both the Agile and formal education conference venues.

Agile was first because I already felt like I had familiarity with the annual Agile conference in the United States since my husband, Eric Willeke, always attends and is usually involved at some level. Being accepted to Agile 2011 in Salt Lake City had me extremely motivated and excited for my first real venture outside of my own world. My doctoral studies have provided me with a stronger and stronger sense of need for interdisciplinary sharing, otherwise understood as cross-community or cross-industry sharing. I felt that this was a good step in making a community aware of the impact made in an industry not otherwise strongly linked with Agile for two reasons. Firstly, it provides a perspective from another industry on the methodology that may not have been realized within the Agile community. Secondly, it was a step, albeit ultra-baby step, to bridging communities. …read more

My previous experience with speaking and presenting left me with a sense of excitement and motivation to share my story of implementing agile techniques with the Agile community at Agile 2011 in Salt Lake City. However, this would be the first attempt at sharing stories in a different industry than my own home turf of the educational world. There are only a billion ways to story-map, limited only by the creativity of the planner. My need for visualisation left me with the question of “why not” when I considered story-mapping with a visual control board. Already a fan and strong user in my professional and personal life of LeanKitKanban’s kanban board product, I added the following board to my account. Now for the story of developing a story… …read more

Experimentation is a constant learning process, and one that I have had very positive results from in 2011 regarding my personal kanban efforts. It is extremely difficult to let go of “I’m right” and develop a mindset of “discovering right”…and even further, understand that the discovery process is a continual one with no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. As my Tae Kwon Do instructor said at the beginning of each meditation, we must strive for perfection of one’s art; not to expect achievement, but to expect continual improvement. …read more