Integrating Learner-centered Design and User-centered Design for Meaningful Instructor Onboarding: Supporting Large-scale Curricular Changes to General Education
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2024
Keywords
Learner-centered Design, User-centered Design, Faculty Development, General Education
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.3998/tia.4276
Abstract
Supporting instructors through large-scale curricular changes to cross-disciplinary programs such as general education is a complex challenge. In this case-based narrative, we describe how one large R1 university in the Southwest United States developed and implemented an instructor support program during a large-scale general education program redesign for a program that had not been substantively revised since 1998. This program typically offers about 500 courses each semester and is taught by roughly 650 instructors. To support the phased rollout of the new program curriculum, we designed and implemented a Quick Start program to support instructors revising courses for the new program, serving over 400 instructors during its first year of implementation.
We discuss our integration of learner-centered design principles (McCombs & Whisler, 1997; Weimer, 2013) to guide the development of the Quick Start program and user-centered design principles (Greer & Harris, 2018; Tham, 2022) to create accessible, useful, and context-driven learning content for the instructors. While these frameworks have been integrated in the past to develop learning materials for students (Jones, 2018; Shivers-McNair et al., 2018), our case-based descriptive analysis presents a novel application of this integration for faculty development. We describe how we integrated these principles to design, scale, iterate, and implement instructor onboarding to the new curriculum. Specifically, we offer four guiding pillars: (i) creating an aligned learning experience, (ii) building an instructional community, (iii) foregrounding an asset-based approach, and (iv) creating useful and usable materials to operationalize such an integration of learner-centered and user-centered design approaches for faculty development.
Rights Information
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Was this content written or created while at USF?
Yes
Citation / Publisher Attribution
To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development, v. 43, issue 2, art. 3
Scholar Commons Citation
Southard, Katelyn M.; Christen, Julie; and Gupta, Anuj, "Integrating Learner-centered Design and User-centered Design for Meaningful Instructor Onboarding: Supporting Large-scale Curricular Changes to General Education" (2024). English Faculty Publications. 292.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/eng_facpub/292
