I recently read an article about how the course development process in higher ed is mostly an informal one due to lack of technology and personnel dedicated to working with faculty on their courses. Add to this the fact that faculty have complete control over their content and you have a very inefficient system (Chapman and Nicolet).
The solution is to apply a project management approach to the development process, which provides the following benefits:
- provide a set of clear expectations in the beginning
- provide a consistent set of processes and templates
- shorten the development cycle
- produce a higher quality product
I have faced the same challenge at work and this article inspired me to create a set of processes and templates for our online course development. Attached is a listing of the forms I’ve created and an explanation of how to use them.
