Aligning university offerings to design the space

The process of Aligning our Universities’ centers

We undertook a three phase alignment process at the beginning of this project. To begin, each institution shared their annual teaching and learning offerings within a mapping document format (see mapping section). Examples of this include Lakehead University’s EdMedia Protege (EMP) Program, and Nipissing University’s annual offering of the Designing Quality Tech-Enabled Learning Experiences course. These maps helped the project team expose what faculty development outcomes our centers currently supported, and the activities that faculty engaged in within center offerings/events. Once done, we could then see the strengths and the diversity of each member institution offering, and the offerings in alignment across our centers of teaching and learning.

As a next step, we sought to achieve increased alignment by grouping offerings/events into logical and legible development pathways that faculty could follow (to connect each offering/event). Each pathway provided a central theme (for example, ‘Humanizing Learning’ or ‘Teaching with Tech’). During this process we also identified gaps in our offering, so that we could discuss areas of improvement. This was extremely instructive as each member in NOUA looked forward to planning future teaching and learning offerings at each university.

Finally, we sought to supplement our offerings with open and accessible external faculty development opportunities. This was done by looking at the many resources from the first round of Virtual Learning Strategy projects, and choosing what was applicable to our teaching and learning context. This final step helped to bridge our identified gaps by leveraging open and accessible faculty development offerings/events that each of the universities believed to be valid and impactful.

The process of Designing our shared space

Challenges with selecting a ‘Faculty Development Passport’ space

The proposed platform for the build of the Faculty Development Passport was Badgr. During project startup Badgr changed ownership, causing many months to pass with company representatives ‘stalling’ the team’s ability to implement the prototype within Badgr.
Once a meeting was possible, the new Badgr cost, now under new ownership, was significantly higher than originally discussed. As a next step, the team looked to either i) build a custom space that allowed for faculty to interact with development maps, and link to badge requests, or ii) connect to other badging platforms/functionality that could support the mapping of NOUA faculty development opportunities.

After review it was determined that building a custom faculty development passport space could not be done within the timeline committed for this project.

At the time of this project’s launch (April 2022) CanCred and eCampusOntario were working to pilot the use of CanCred ‘spaces’ functionality, linked to the eCampusOntario Passport already known to many Ontario faculty members. The expected release of these upgrades was unknown at the time of our original inquiry, but the team was confident that by the time the design was complete, the platform and support provided would allow for basic supports and interactions to be tested.

Approach to designing the Faculty Development Passport space

In the end, for this project, once CanCred released the Open Badge Factory  spaces and minimaps functionality in the Fall of 2022, the team moved quickly to build out a prototype space for faculty co-designers to utilize, in order for them to be able to provide feedback. Maps previously created for offline access, having been refined by co-designer feedback, were built into the space. Within the simplified functionality provided by spaces and minimaps, visual communication elements (color, iconography, layout, etc) were tested to determine if they were perceived accurately by our co-designers. This is a critical step to help with the perceived ‘ease of use’ for all NOUA faculty, utilizing the development passport space. The team went with standard/common communication elements knowing that the co-designers would use the space in ‘beta’ to communicate their perceptions of ease of use of the Faculty Development Passport in phase 2. Two more iterations were needed to refine these choices thanks to co-designer and critical friend feedback.