Managing the design and production of online courses is challenging. Insufficient instructional design and inefficient management often lead to issues such as poor course quality and course delivery delays. In an effort to facilitate, streamline, and improve the overall design and production of online courses, this article discusses how we implemented Microsoft Project 2003, based on our online course development framework and online course development approaches. This article represents an attempt to approach online course development from a systematic perspective, using Microsoft Office Project Server 2003 (Enterprise Project Management) in a higher education environment.
Introduction
According to the latest SLOAN-C annual report (Allen & Seaman, 2006), more than 96 percent of large institutions have some online offerings (with more than 3.2 million students). Online course delivery has become a key alternative to face-to-face delivery. With students expecting and demanding anytime, anywhere access to courses, higher education institutions are increasing and diversifying their course offerings by combining hybrid, online, and face-to-face courses to attract nonresidents and adult learners. In order to be responsive to students and to market needs, and yet remain competitive and forward-looking, universities are investing heavily in the design and production of online courses (Bartolic & Bates, 1999).
However, design and production of quality online courses requires a streamlined workflow and the collaboration of several specialists (subject-matter, instructional, technical) working together in a team environment (Phillips, 2005). There are many requirements and concerns related to the design and production of online courses including time management, resource assignment, formative evaluation, quality control, and revision of courses (Chao, Saj, & Tessier, 2006). Thus, managing efficiently and effectively the design and production of a large number of courses is challenging and sometimes daunting. Furthermore, when planning the delivery of online courses, the issue of course quality remains a major concern for many colleges and universities (Chao et al., 2006). Insufficient instructional design and inefficient management of the design and production process of online courses often lead to issues such as poor quality course design, unavailable resources, budget shortfall, and course delivery delay. Hence, to be successful, establishing an effective and efficient management process to produce online courses is crucial.
In response to these management challenges and in an effort to facilitate, streamline, and improve overall design and production of online courses, we developed an online course development framework and identified four different approaches for online course design and production. This framework and theses approaches are based on an extensive literature review, expert evaluations, and years of experience in designing and developing hybrid, synchronous, asynchronous, CD-ROM, two-way video, and online courses. Furthermore, to manage these four approaches in a systematic way and to address issues such as planning, collaboration, quality, resources, and time management, we integrated the four approaches with the Microsoft Office Project Server 2003 (Enterprise Project Management or EPM) based on our practical online course development framework. The purpose of this paper is to share our experience in streamlining and systematizing online course design and production by blending project management practices with a comprehensive online course development framework and operational course development approaches (Kenny, Zhang, Schwier, & Campbell, 2005; Layng, 1997; Litchfield & Keller, 2002).
By opting for a systematic approach to planning, designing, and producing online courses facilitated by EPM, we anticipate that our approach of blending project management and online course development practices will position us to reach the following goals:
Increase our unit’s ability to keep up with the ever-increasing demands for online course/program development, regardless of their size, duration, and complexity, and to eventually shorten the current course development cycle;
Optimize the resource usage by creating a common course development framework and project workspace, as well as standardized managing, reporting, and tracking processes across all our project teams;
Transform our unit into a learning organization by creating a body of knowledge around online course development (e.g., content collection templates, production toolkit, and quality assurance checklists);
Facilitate knowledge transfer (Disterer, 2002) among projects by retaining past project lessons and easily retrieving/reusing them in future projects in order to refine and improve our internal processes;
Use EPM as an enabling tool to promote organizational culture change (Partington, 1996) and thus transform our staff into reflective practitioners (Crawford, Morris, Thomas, & Winter, 2006) able to learn, adapt and progress in their daily tasks and routines.
Online Course Development Framework
Our project management methodology was developed based on the work of a number of researchers and acknowledges the cyclical nature of online course development (Jiang & Heiser, 2004; Phillips, 2005). A significant benefit of this approach is that it provides an opportunity for all stakeholders to understand their responsibilities and roles. This lifecycle approach is translated into the diagram below, which outlines the phases, roles, assumptions, and risks associated with online course design and production. Our online course development framework identifies seven sequential/ iterative phases broken down into subtasks:
Preplanning (Project Definition): during this phase the project director clarifies the project scope, deliverables, and expectations. This phase requires senior leadership involvement and approval to specify the foundations, support, and resources for subsequent phases.
Planning: in this phase the project manager (Instructional Designer) works closely with faculty to clarify roles, time commitment, expectations, and risks.
Analysis: this phase is dedicated to completing the course requirements and readiness analysis. Several premade templates are used during this process to facilitate content collection and to ensure consistency between projects.
Design and Prototype: during this phase the emphasis is on finalizing the interface and completing a representative prototype to assist in producing the course content. This phase requires intensive communication among all the team members to ensure a rigorous testing and quality assurance process. In our approach, quality assurance is an iterative and ongoing process built in to each phase of the development, using tailored checklists.
Production: this phase is the longest period of the process. After testing and approving the prototype, team members produce the course content incrementally or simultaneously. Each segment is produced, reviewed, and approved by faculty and the project manager.
Postproduction: this phase prepares faculty to teach online by attending workshops and seminars and by preparing course delivery documentation. In addition to this, this phase provides the opportunity to identify, capture, and document lessons learned and to review and update project templates.
Delivery: in the last phase, faculty and student feedback about the course, the content, the layout, and the activities is collected. This feedback is used to improve future course offerings and development.
In addition to outlining the subtasks of each phase, this diagram is designed to summarize our unit’s overall conceptual and operational framework. This framework is extremely useful in presenting and sharing our processes and assumptions with university administrators, faculty and staff involved in online course development. By sharing up-front our development timeline (6 months), roles, assumptions, risks (lack of content, nonrespect of timeline) and expectations, we reduce miscommunication and contribute to the success and completion of the program/course development.
Online Course Development Approaches
As a learning organization, the Center for Learning Technologies enjoys the reputation of gathering under the same umbrella a pool of talent and experts in online course design and development. Our extensive experience includes designing and producing dozens of courses for a variety of delivery modes (hybrid, synchronous, asynchronous, CD-ROM, two-way video). To capture our experience in a systematic way, we conducted a number of weekly meetings with instructional designers, instructional technologists, graphics designers, multimedia designers, and video production managers to identify and capture their knowledge and experiences with the design and production of online courses. Drawing from this pool of talent and after going through several iterations of reviews and improvements, we identified four different approaches to online course development. These approaches are categorized with relevance to complexity of overall instructional design and multimedia production. Depending on the pedagogical goals and requirements of each online course, we work together with faculty to decide the choice of the approaches. Our objective is to reach the highest level of both faculty and student satisfaction with online courses, based on the available resources we have. As shown in the table below, the shift of requirements between instructional design and multimedia development is dictated by the level of effort required for each approach. For example, approach D generally requires more time and higher effort than other approaches for online course development such as the creation of syllabus, course introduction, course objectives, learning activities and interaction.
By presenting this matrix, we are able to share with our faculty and administrators another tool that clarifies our quality, commitment, and workload requirements.
Microsoft Office Project Server (Epm) As A Management Tool
Along with EPM, there are several project management software programs on the market such as BaseCamp (http://www.basecamphq.com/), GForge (http://gforge.org/), and Maven (http://maven.apache.org/). However, we decided to use EPM because it is widely used in business and industry. Many organizations shared successful experiences for deploying and implementing this tool. In their study about the factors influencing the usage and selection of project management software in industry, Liberatore and Pollack-Johnson (2003) mentioned that Microsoft Project was used by nearly 50% of respondents, followed by Primavera Project Planner (P3) at 21%, all others at 5% or less.
EPM is project management software designed to assist project managers to develop plans and timelines, assign resources to tasks and, more importantly, track progress, manage budgets, and track team members’ workload. Although project management as a field of practice has accumulated an extensive body of knowledge and wide industry-based experience, it is still largely absent from higher education institutions (Shenhar, 1999). Wierschem and Johnston (2005) note that academia has historically lagged behind in the adoption of new information technology products such as project management. In this regard, we posit that the organizational culture of higher education institutions and the disconnection between instructional design models and project management practices are among the barriers that impede the adoption and the integration of EPM solutions in higher education.
Guided by our online course development framework and the level of effort associated with each approach, we created a project plan template for each approach. As a first step, new courses are categorized under one of the four approaches (Approach A, B, C, or D), based on the pedagogical goals and requirements, course timeline, and budget and administrative support (individual versus departmental). Following this, we select the appropriate project plan template, detailing the tasks associated with each phase. Each heading is broken into subtasks, displaying information about: task identification number, indicators (related information), task names, task duration, task start and finish dates, task relationships, and team members assigned to the task.
Team members use a Web interface where they can view and update their tasks and progress on a weekly basis. Project managers review project status and progress reporting by task or resource for a selected period. Basically, the Web project space provides a shared space for project templates and related documents.
Preliminary Lessons Learned
Informed by the above online course development framework, four online course development approaches, and strong project management tool, we believe our approach to streamlining and systematizing online course development is innovative and promising. Our framework, approaches, and EPM implementation are still permeating our organization’s processes and practices. However, we have gained some valuable insights and learned some early lessons. We believe that sharing these lessons will be useful for those practitioners who are considering using EPM in a higher education environment.
Senior Leadership Support
By expressing strong commitment and support to our EPM implementation, our senior leadership contributed greatly to the creation of a supportive organizational culture and environment. Indeed, He, Means, and Lin (2006) report that having a supportive organizational culture and environment is vital for the success of project implementation. However, we are mindful that change management requires attentive listening and consideration to staff involved in the implementation. As Folger and Skarlicki (1999) point out, change usually generates skepticism and resistance in personnel, making it sometimes difficult or impossible to implement organizational improvements. Consequently, before designing the system, we spent considerable effort in cultivating the support of the staff members by continuously meeting to develop common understandings, listening to feedback, and addressing specific benefits, issues, and concerns. These regular meetings with stakeholders kept the implementation of the EPM on track and alleviated several predictable concerns about the viability of the project management solution.
Staff Training
In addition to the staged approach of the implementation, staff training was at the center of our implementation process. Using EPM causes a somewhat steep learning curve at the beginning. We therefore organized several training sessions targeting users’ categories (project managers and team members). In addition, we provided several handouts and tutorials, while encouraging all staff members to share their experiences and knowledge using EPM.
Server Configuration, Documentation, and Backup
Setting up and configuring the project server properly is a time-consuming and complex process. EPM installation requires specialized skills in Web server administration and server and database administration (Microsoft Windows Server, Internet Information Services, SharePoint Services, and Microsoft SQL). After several failed installations, we decided to document every step of our installation, particularly the customized changes and fixes gathered through the different newsgroups. In addition to this, we made a backup of the server after each installation milestone.
Conclusion and Future Work
By blending a systematic approach to planning, designing, and producing online courses with EPM, we consider our approach to be robust and promising. We expect to transform our unit into a flexible learning organization capable of building flexible knowledge both on streamlining and on producing high quality online courses in an efficient and effective way. Early results indicate a high level of student and faculty satisfaction with our online courses. In this regard, and from a research perspective, this article highlights the need for research to investigate the efficacy of our integrative approach and, in particular, the efficacy of project management practices in improving the overall efficiency and effectiveness of online course development. In addition to this, research is needed to investigate the validity of our online course development approaches. Finally, our article is also intended to initiate a discussion about using EPM as a management tool for online program development.
