All posts by Megan Stemm-Wade

Enter Kanban: The SNL ID Team Gets Organized

In the School for New Learning Online, we adhere to a fairly rigid course-development schedule and course-readiness process. Each quarter, we have a robust set of deadlines to meet to get our schedule of 90+ courses built, revised, reviewed, and launched. And like any team of instructional designers, the SNL Online team has plenty of other projects and daily fires to put out as well. Keeping on top of our work and keeping connected with each other, especially when we need to share resources and skill sets, could be difficult at best. Isolated in our offices and buried under piles of work, sometimes our only connection was in those series of e-mails that we would inevitably send around and around to ask a simple question. You know those emails—the ones where everyone is copied and everyone hits reply all? Toward the end of last year, we were lucky enough to see our team grow to five with the addition of two new members. It became clear that we needed some new strategies for our work.

Enter Kanban.

After consulting with a local team-dynamics coach, Derek Wade of Kumido, we decided to try a team communication tool called Kanban. For a very low investment—tape, pens, and sticky notes—we could get started right away. We agreed on several things: we would have a team board put up in a common area; we would divide it into four categories of next, now, blocked, and done. We chose different colored sticky notes for each team member (I have pink, of course) and settled on daily fifteen-minute meetings at the board to update it and each other.

With that, we got started.

 
The SNL ID team’s Kanban board

The five of us have been meeting around the board, at least three times a week for nearly six months now, and we have noticed several significant changes in the way we work. First, we know at a very quick glance what the workload is for any team member at any given time. This has allowed us to better utilize each other and to know when someone is bogged down and might need a hand.

We also have developed a sort of “thermometer” to get a sense of how much course maintenance—those pesky fires we need to put out for faculty and students—we are each handling. One the left side of the board, we have a column labeled maint and we move our individually colored sticky note up or down to reflect how many fires we have going in a week. Keeping aware of this part of our jobs has helped us, and me particularly, become more aware of how we handle this area. I know seeing my pink sticky always at the top of the column has inspired me to adjust my general work day so that when these hot-button issues come in, they can be handled without interrupting the flow of my larger projects. For instance, I started handling fires in my inbox in the morning while settling in with my morning cup of tea, then moving on to other projects for the better part of the day. A similar time is set aside in the later afternoon. The number of fires doesn’t change, but the way I handle them—and my stress level—improved dramatically. 


Maintenance Thermometer

Lastly, while we all have reported favorable changes in our personal organization of work and tasks to varying degrees, each team member feels more connected and has seen our communication increase dramatically. We are in touch more often and have a much better idea of what is happening in our department. At the same time, the thrice-weekly short meeting sessions have meant less overall meetings needed for all of us. Our weekly staff meetings with the rest of the SNL Online staff are more efficient since we are already up-to-date on our work and our team progress. And, I’m happy to report, there are so many fewer reply-all e-mails.

As well as it has worked for us, a Kanban that never changes is one that has stopped helping you grow, so next for us is a redesign of our board. We’ll try to better categorize our work and evolve the process to reflect how we have grown since we stared using it. Watch this space for Kanban II: Electric Boogaloo.

Course Development: Is On the Fly Always Bad?

In the world of instructional design, it is a given that a set lead time is necessary for online-course development. With faculty availability, course load, and designer workload in mind, the instructional designer wants to plan up front to make as much time and room for the development process as possible. To nail down course objectives, learning activities that meet those objectives, media assets, and any of the other myriad pieces of course content, an instructional designer generally favors the cushion of perhaps two terms ahead of when the course is to be taught to coordinate with the instructor and the other members of the design team.

On the other hand, “on the fly” course development—that is, building a course as it is being taught, week by week—is a common, if little desired, practice. Instructors have many priorities, including academic travel, which too often trump their commitment to developing new courses. Resourceful instructional designers make a course happen, even when bumping against (and past) deadlines. Designing on the fly can seem like the least-desired way to develop an online course offering, but is it always?

Software development, a field not too far flung from online training and teaching, has recently begun to realize a sea change in the dominant process philosophy: from traditional, upfront “waterfall” process to iterative, adaptive, “agile” methods. Waterfall is a process where the activities flow down an orderly succession of steps, such as:

  1. Concept
  2. Requirements
  3. Architectural design
  4. Detailed design
  5. Coding and development
  6. Testing and implementation

This linear series of steps is in contrast to the “agile” concept of development, where projects are built in iterations, with regular retrospection into the needs of the customer and how the evolving project should adapt to meet them.

iterative design
Image courtesy Kumido Adaptive Strategies

At its core, agile believes that it is impossible to know everything required to build software up front, that the customer can only gain that knowledge from the process itself.1 And so it often is with course development! Until a course is actually taught to students, it can be impossible to determine whether it will meet their learning needs as it is designed. That tool for the synchronous session never worked as it was promised and will need to be abandoned for a better option, or you realized during the quarter that those five-point discussions need to be turned into written assignments.

This isn’t to say that the structure of a course should be changed midstream. The syllabus given to students at the beginning of the offering term is essentially a learning contract and sets an expectation for the learning experience to come. But what if the process of developing the course allowed for a more iterative model? What would a more agile approach to instructional design look like? How could we design learning modules that are highly adaptable and easily changed? Can we embrace the idea that learning materials and programs are not designed, then built, and only then evaluated—let alone that they are produced with the expectation of updates and new versions to be produced? How do we adapt the course-development process to allow for much, much more feedback from the learners and educational stakeholders?

As e-learning becomes online learning and online learning becomes a major component of the educational model, our development techniques and philosophies must also evolve. All development up front is an ideal, but perhaps it is an ideal of the past.

1 Extracted from: Lean-Agile Software Development: Achieving Enterprise Agility by Alan Shalloway, Guy Beaver, James R. Trott – NetObjectives Lean-Agile Series.

Desire2Learn Primer

There is always a learning curve when it comes to making a major change. DePaul’s switch from Blackboard to its new learning-management system, Desire2Learn, is no exception, but don’t be afraid! With some knowledge, training from Faculty Instructional Technology Services, and a little practice, Desire2Learn skills are easily within your reach.

First, Consider the Metaphor

In Blackboard, course materials, whether for a fully online class or a hybrid course, were posted in a folder structure, with folders generally as buckets for weeks or modules. A syllabus, for instance, would be uploaded as a new “item” into a specific location, which was a folder.

Desire2Learn has a tree-structure, rather than folders. Navigation is across the top of the course, rather than on the left, as my colleague Eric talks about here. In Desire2Learn, a course generates with a more fluid structure in place, as opposed to Blackboard, which had a handful of set menu items. In Desire2Learn, you get to decide how you want your course to look and where your items should be.

Next, Decide How It Should Look

Think about how you want your course structured: Do you just need a place for students to access your syllabus and weekly readings? Are you teaching fully online in a weekly schedule? Do you use modules? Is your course ten weeks? Five weeks? FITS has a variety of templates for download, that, when imported into your course, will create a basic structure in which you can organize your course. The templates will build the empty “buckets” in which you can upload or create the course materials you need.

Then, Begin to Build

Once you’ve determined how your course should be arranged, you can upload files through the “Manage Course Files” section of your course (accessed when you click “Content” in the Navbar). Once you’ve uploaded the files you need in your course, it is easy to drag and drop them into the module or structure where you want it to live using the “Course Builder” tool. The Course Builder also allows you to create new pages, like a new “item” in Blackboard. You can copy text from Word documents (from, example, a syllabus) and paste it into a page.

And of Course, Ask for Help

Getting from your empty course shell to a fully built, fully featured course offering might not happen the first time you sit down in front of Desire2Learn. When you get caught up in a question you can’t answer, FITS is here to help. DePaul Faculty have access to on-campus training at Lincoln Park and in the Loop designed to teach the basics of course building, as well as proficiency with specific tools. FITS also offers an online, self-paced training course, which offers documentation, tutorials, and point-of-contact support.

Keeping It Visible: The Joys of Offline Organization

Keeping on top of the daily multitude of tasks we all have in our work is like having another full-time job. There are a number of tools available to the most casual computer users, from the tasks and to-do lists in Microsoft Outlook, to Apple’s Project X, to a variety of Web programs like blist.com and Zoho. In IDD, keeping up with the dynamic nature of the academic environment is especially challenging. Anyone stepping into my shared workspace in the IDD offices at the DePaul Center will quickly notice my own low-tech yet cutting-edge (I think) solution to task management: sticky notes and a wall.

It looks something like this: there are three columns of stickies, each headed by a large note which categorizes that column. “Upcoming Tasks” in the left-most column, followed by “Current Tasks” in the middle, and “Items for Inspection” on the right. Projects or tasks that I need to complete, but which are not a priority today go in the “Upcoming” column. Those things I am working on today belong in the middle. If a project is large, I break it up in to smaller pieces that can be completed more quickly. Those finished projects, or tasks that require the review or “inspection” of others to be considered complete, go under that last large sticky.

Though I’d like to, I can’t take credit for this system. I first learned of the sticky-note revolution from my husband, an agile process-management consultant who teaches the sticky-note idea to teams in a variety of fields, from software to education. What the sticky notes do for me is help keep my workload visible to me and to anyone who needs to know what I’m working on and the status of those projects. At a glance, my colleagues can see where my efforts will be focused on a given day, and this knowledge facilitates ready discussion. The portable nature of the stickies also allows me to reprioritize my work each day. I can reach up and peel off a project under the “Current” heading—perhaps a course that has been shifted to future quarter—and replace it with a new, more immediate task. Should I run into a problem with a task, or need more information in order to complete it, I add a “flag” sticky to that task. Flags are a bright color and list the issue to be resolved. They are removed when the impediment is. Of course, the act of moving a completed task to that finished column gives me a boost in a very real, tactile sense which helps keep my motivation to continue on to the next task.

Adapting the sticky note system to my work in IDD keeps me organized, but also flexible, adaptive and motivated to move that next sticky into the “done” column. I love a good Web app as much as the next person, but I also appreciate simplicity and ease with which I can keep myself organized with just a few adhesive note and a good black pen.