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Co-Designing an Entry-Level Public Health Course

By IGI Global on Sep 28, 2010
IGI Global would like to take this time to thank Shalin Hai-Jew for contributing this TWO PART guest editorial post. Her book, Digital Imagery and Informational Graphics in E-Learning: Maximizing Visual Technologies, has been recently published by IGI Global. In September, she will be releasing her forthcoming publication through IGI Global titled, Virtual Immersive and 3D Learning Spaces: Emerging Technologies and Trends. You can contact her directly at haijes@gmail.com or be leaving a comment below... With the growing complexity of so much learning and the growing prevalence of interdisciplinary co-development of online courses, cross-functional teams are becoming a regular part of academic instructional design work. Further, many of these cross-functional team members hail from different universities and colleges that are not geographically co-located. This virtual work situation requires plenty of information-rich communications and shared technological workspaces for collaboration, intercommunications, digital sharing, and co-building of digital objects.

A Shared Virtual Workspace

One critical element for success has to be the mix of tools that come together to create a shared virtual workspace. The technological affordances of such spaces are many: supporting real-time collaborations, supporting asynchronous communications, archiving shared work, providing dedicated spaces for particular digital builds, and offering a space for the coalescing of an online course.

Often Web 2.0 technologies are used in combination with on-campus learning / course management systems (L/CMS) for the most effective mixes.




What Virtual Teams Need to Know

Virtual team members need knowledge of the project goals. They need to know each other's assigned roles and skill sets; they need to know each other's personalities. They need to know the shared technologies that will be used along with the output file types, for the most convenient portability (between learning / course management systems and digital libraries / repositories). They need a sense of the different learners who will be using this curriculum and how their needs may differ (in terms of learning needs, technological needs, and others). They also need a sense of the quality controls.

They need a sense of workflow and where the decision junctures are—such as the consensus-based decision-making about the prototyped and drafted digital learning objects. They need a clear sense of how even contentious decisions are made.

Virtual team members need to know the legal expectations for the project, particularly in relation to intellectual property and accessibility guidelines. Virtual teams also need to maintain records of the provenance of their digital resources. They need a clear sense of course branding, whether they participate directly in the course branding or not. These elements are usually arrived at via discussions and consensus-building work, and the information then is archived in a stylebook.

Ideal Virtual Team Work

Ideally, virtual teams meet deadlines with quality curricular contents, and they come in under budget. All the voices of the respective team members should be heard and seen in the resulting learning objects. All members should have a positive influence on the extant curriculum.

The most positive effect would be the protection of professional relationships in the long term because professionals in the field will encounter each other again with a need for cooperation and shared information and resources. These relationships will often last well beyond when the initial project ends.

Note: More on the Pathways to Public Health ( http://onehealthkansas.k-state.edu/pathways/3/pathways-to-public-health) endeavor may be accessed in "Structuring a Local Virtual Work Ecology for a Collaborative, Multi-Institutional Higher Education Project (A Case Study)" in Dr. Shawn D. Long's book Communication, Relationships and Practices in Virtual Work (2010). More information on this endeavor may also be accessed at the OneHealthKansas website ( www.onehealthkansas.ksu.edu/).
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