eLearning Course Management And Delivery Made Easy!
Throughout my digital transformation consulting practice, I’ve been doing a lot of work with colleges that initially had little, if any, digital experience, yet needed to shift to fully online delivery with the “speed of light.” It should be noted that such rapid transformation of the course delivery practices inevitably results in skeptics raising their eyebrows and questioning whether integrity and quality standards of the delivery can be sustained throughout the change phase and beyond. Many of these skeptics happened to be members of the colleges’ teaching and course management teams who initially felt concerned about the upcoming digital transformations of the modus operandi.
The main objective of this article is to provide a condensed step-by-step guide for ensuring that online delivery of training courses (irrespective of the discipline these courses belong to including completely non-technical disciplines such as cookery or arts) maintain the originally established operational standards and provide colleges with ongoing quality controls over all of the business and educational processes involved throughout the digital transformation.
The online delivery mode comes with new technologies, and upgraded business processes…but is no less “responsible” for achieving an enhanced version of the same teaching and learning outcomes as the traditional classroom-based ones. The optimal approach to ensure a swift transition to online delivery is templating all of the operational and delivery processes so that the educators and the support staff are clear about all the tasks they are to undertake, and the managers are able to monitor compliance with these operational requirements by working through the checklists (aka filled templates) for all of the processes.
The 5-Step Templated Process For Online Course Delivery And Management
Templating of the eLearning processes can be accomplished through a fairly straightforward 5-step process:
- Designing course maps
- Assigning content delivery tools
- Preparing course map-matching templates and checklists
- Testing and optimizing the templates and checklists
- Implementation of template management and feedback systems
Step 1: Designing Course Maps
During the initial step, prepare documentation that outlines course objectives and breaks down these objectives into clusters, so all the linked tasks are grouped together. After the initial grouping is done, the content of the course can be divided into logical modules and sections with deliverables (e.g. quizzes, assessments, video content, etc.) listed against each of the modules.
Step 2: Assignment Content Delivery Tools
Once the course map inclusive of all of the deliverables is ready, delivery support applications and tools can be selected and assigned. Choices of tools may vary depending on the LMS deployed, since some teaching and learning tools can do wonders for a particular Learning Management System but are not so effective with other systems.
Part of this decision-making process is establishing how user-friendly the tools are in the view of your specific user cohort, as empowering more members of the delivery team to contribute to content management and development is certainly going to be beneficial for making the operation more agile.
Step 3: Preparing Course Map-Matching Templates And Checklists
This is the step when the actual process management templates get created. Each template includes a comprehensive list of activities for relevant processes to be completed. For example, instructors who deliver online courses will be able to go through the templates to ensure that all of the activities assigned to them have been completed and “tick-off” the completions prior to passing forms further up the management ladder for validation.
It will make non-completion of critical tasks (for example, setting up discussion boards at the start of the semester or populating practice quizzes with questions) mission impossible as when going through the checklists, the instructors will easily spot the obvious shortcomings. Likewise, managers will have enhanced traceability of all the operational activities.
Step 4: Testing And Optimizing The Templates And Checklists
Putting templates to work and collecting feedback from users will be instrumental in improving the initial draft versions produced. Furthermore, it will ensure that the delivery and support processes that have initially been erroneously overlooked get added to the process maps. Nothing will be left unchecked during the testing process and templates and checklists will also get organized better.
Step 5: Implementation Of Template Management And Feedback Systems
The last but not the least critical step is to establish avenues for recording and storage of the data as well as the creation of a feedback loop between the workers responsible for the execution of the tasks and the management team. Not only will online delivery be constantly “under control” but it will also save a lot of time by avoiding non-mandatory meetings and discussions since the templates will make all records of the workplace activities easily accessible to all stakeholders from the documents created.
Conclusion
To sum up the 5-step process outlined above, it is all about having a structured approach toward online delivery and ensuring that each and every aspect of the delivery is easy to monitor with difficulties and discrepancies being easy to identify. Upon successful implementation of this approach for a number of client colleges (including the ones that have been delivering courses that are not usually considered to be fitting for online delivery shoes), it seems to be working amicably!