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Designing for Teaching and Learning

Our Philosophy. 

Traditional instructional design is a systematic approach to match audience analysis, instructional activities, assessment, and evaluation. We believe this approach works well for eLearning approaches (i.e., self-paced training) but does not fit the reality of distance education approaches. The dynamic nature of educational instruction requires a different approach; one centered on the instructor, the relationship between the instructor and student, and planned teaching/learning activities. 

We believe that Blackboard is a tool to support teaching and learning. Any Course Management System (CMS) does a good job of managing the administrative functions of teaching (grades, communications, content display, student rosters, manage users, assessments, etc.). We help you understand the administrative aspects of the management system to make these tasks more efficient. Our passion is helping you develop powerful teaching/learning activities to provide students with experiences  contributing to their understanding of content. 

We believe that TWU instructors are the designers and developers of powerful learning experiences. We support instructors' interested in learning to control the CMS in ways to enhance teaching and learning. We serve as your sounding board as you explore ways to use the CMS to design and deliver the educational activity that you want your students to experience.

How we Approach our Work.

You won't find TWU Instructional Designers in their office very often. Our intent is to establish partnerships with faculty. We want you to think about how the perfect distance learning course would look and function. Our job is to help you "capture the vision" and to work with you to make it a reality. We will put in the time and research to help you create this vision.

You will find that we ask you to think about what you want students to be able to know and do as a result of your course. Once we understand how you see your work, we will listen to your ideas about projects, processes, and products that you believe will give students the skills and knowledge necessary for your field. By understanding these ideas, we will work with you to look at the prerequisite knowledge and skills necessary to successful develop these products. Quite simply, we use a "backward design" process (Wiggins, 1998) to help you sequentially build course activities to meet your specific outcomes. We start with the end in mind and work through the assessments and activities until you are ready to write your instructional objectives.

We see this as "learning design" rather than instructional design. Traditional instructional design is a behaviorist model that assumes that if you can write the perfect objectives and then design and assess toward these objectives - learning occurs. Quite frankly, if teaching and learning were this easy - we would have solved the puzzle a long time ago. We encourage you to dream and then work with you to divide your dream into manageable instructional elements that fit into the existing CMS.    

The work of teaching is fraught with uncertainty. For you to share your ideas for a perfect course, you have to know that we are after the same outcomes as you. We are about teaching and learning - we just choose to do it in the distance education arena. We are about making you successful and helping you make your students successful.

How we Might Assist you.

• Review your course using the QualityMatters (QM) rubric and make suggestions to help your course meet the QM standards
• Provide recommendations on various ways to package content
• Review your course for consistency in the organization of materials
• Provide recommendations on teaching, learning, and assessment options
• Demonstrate how to accomplish uploads, formatting, and other skills useful for the LMS
• Provide recommendations on interaction and management strategies
• Suggest pedogigical implications for Blackboard tools
• Research issues to help faculty developers achieve their vision for the course
• Provide recommendations on matching tools and technologies to online content
• Assist you with forming effective practices for managing your distance course
• Develop prototypes of activities and interactions based on ideas from the faculty developer
• Provide recommendations on navigation, organization, and frameworks for content and course layout
• Discuss strategies for incorporating new technologies or organizational schemes into your existing courses
• Provide recommendations to transition F2F activities and materials to the online environment
• Educate on the pedagogy of online teaching and learning
• Work with you and the Distance Librarian to locate and utilize more outside academic resources for your course

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