Do you like the CTL’s Teaching Online Course Prep Guide, and want to know more about how we made it? Here we document both the technical and human work processes it took to build this guide. We started work on it in April 2020, roughly one month into the stay-at-home order that forced all classes at CUNY to shift to distance learning. This guide is based off of a hybrid course prep guide some of us had created a few years ago, and it is currently in its 3rd edition.
We made this ‘Recipe Book’ to pull back the curtain on some of our own pedagogical design choices. We account for the tools that we’ve used (and why we used them), but also the harder-to-see decisions that we made as a team and that impact how the guide looks, feels, and operates. We hope that learning about how we made this will help you understand the planning, time commitment, technologies, and physical limits you may encounter as you design your own course or other pedagogical projects.
Tools
Below, you’ll find a list of the tools that we used to make this guide, along with an explanation of what it was like to use them and why we selected them. We’ve also added some ‘accessibility notes’ for each tool. An accessible pedagogy calls for keeping access centered in the design process, whether we are designing teaching and learning guides like this, or classroom courses. As authors and designers of this guide, we are committed to accessibility (more here), and we want to be transparent about the accessibility features and limitations of these tools.
Production Process and Team
With the exception of our director, all of the people who designed this guide are part-time employees at the Center for Teaching and Learning. We come from different academic disciplines (English, Library Science, Management, Media Studies, Psychology, Sociology, History, and Theatre). We are all teachers. Many of us hold other jobs (or several other jobs). Some of us are currently graduate students. Three of us are parents. This is to say that we do not share the same work schedule. Working on this totally synchronously would have not been possible.
This meant that the production of this guide was, well, complex!
A few things really helped us to find a good rhythm (and have, incidentally, influenced some of us to think about how we can bring the good vibes from this project into our own classrooms, especially since our recent student survey and lots of other data suggests that group projects are hard to pull off in the distance learning context.)
Here are some of the lessons we learned in the process.
Pedagogical Decisions We Made
In our design process, we had to consider a lot of things. First, we work at a school where classes look really different from one another. We wanted to make something that was flexible enough to speak to everyone without being so general that it wasn’t very useful.
Secondly, we knew that people who are looking at this would have different experiences with teaching online. We wanted to design something that could work for beginners, but also offer something to people who have been teaching online for years.
In many ways, our design process mirrors what many instructors face. Students come to our classes with different experiences with the content that we’re teaching. Some students don’t have the foundational knowledge to start at the same place as others. Some students are excited by our content, others are fearful, and others are taking our course because it is required. Some students want more, and others feel overwhelmed.
To design a guide that appeals to a lot of people, we used Universal Design for Learning (UDL): a framework for instruction that is rooted in disability justice, and so maximizes flexibility so that learners with and from diverse access levels, backgrounds, experiences, interest levels, and knowledges are able to find an entry point that makes sense for them.
Here’s what we did.
The above enumeration of how we considered UDL principles into our design and work processes does not mean that the guide is fully accessible by all types of learners. Far from it. We acknowledge that this guide may not be the right tool for folks whose learning preferences may not be represented in our design, and that accessibility is an evolving process rather than a “destination.” There will always be more to fix, and competing access needs to work through. As designers and authors of this guide we are committed to making it more accessible. We will continue to identify the UDL areas where we fall short, and work on that. If you have concerns, feedback, and/or want to help us make this guide more accessible, please reach out to us at [email protected]. We thank you in advance for your work.