Developing Online Programmes

The Science Digital Education team can manage the development process for online programmes. Here is an example from our work with the Psychology department.

Scenario

The Executive MSc in Behavioural Science was approved in late 2023 for launch in September 2024. It is an 18-month programme, aimed at professionals looking to deepen their understanding of behavioural science in the workplace, as well as those contemplating a career or role transition. The programme is fully online, with two residential blocks in September of each year. 

The Science Digital Education team worked with the teaching team to develop the programme ready for the launch in September 2024, supporting the planning, writing, and creation of learning activities and resources, using a range of digital planning and collaboration tools, as well as advising on good practice in digital pedagogy, inclusion and accessibility, copyright and more.

This is the first online postgraduate programme to be delivered by the Faculty of Science, so it is a change of practice for the teaching team. To support flexible learning, the programme has limited ‘live teaching’ sessions, so to ensure teaching hours are met, careful thought has gone into designing and building active learning activities for students taking part.

Solution 

The Science Digital Education team are working with teaching staff to plan, write, and develop materials which are then pulled together in Blackboard. Alongside these, learning activities are developed using the tools within the VLE to engage students with their learning. With the change in practice to online teaching, we ensure that each module is developed and built before its launch, so that during the teaching stage the course team can focus on engaging with students, facilitating discussions online, and providing support and guidance through the learning journey.  

To provide students with a structured, consistent approach to their learning, each module is broken down into weeks, with each week assigned a theme or topic aligned with the module’s learning outcomes. Every activity that the students participate in should have a clear purpose within the module, with alignment to assessment. We use a constructive alignment approach, beginning with planning the assessment and working backwards to plan out all the elements necessary to support the student to succeed. This provides the outline of the module, with all the fundamental knowledge and skills in place; from here we connect the steps together and add the extras.  

This programme is aimed at professionals, so our design needs to recognise and take account of their commitments and priorities in their professional and personal lives. Whilst there will be students who go the extra mile, we can anticipate that others may be quite strategic in choosing what they complete to pass a module. To account for this, regular formative assessment opportunities are provided throughout the module to keep students engaged and working their way through the activities and learning resources. 

We treat the development of each module as its own project and manage tasks using 2-week sprints with each development block having a set number of weeks (of the module) to work on. We break these development blocks into Storyboarding, Writing, and Resource Creation, plus 3 weeks for the Science Digital Education team to build the week in Blackboard. The process is scheduled over nine months in 5 development blocks.

Project Management

We manage the module development process using Microsoft Loop. The Programme has its own Workspace¹ and we use Pages and Subpages² to monitor the progress of each task. Here, we can assign tasks to ‘owners’ (members of the Science Digital Education team as well as the teaching team), set deadlines according to the sprint start and end dates, document delays (blockers), and provide guidance to explain the process. Using the Progress Tracker within Loop, we can indicate if a task has not been started, is in progress, blocked, ready for review, or completed. This provides an easy visual overview of progress, available to any member of the teaching and development teams.

Module Overview Storyboarding

Each module has a comprehensive planning board, created on Miro, and we run workshops to guide the teaching team through the planning process. We break the module down into weekly topics, to create a coherent learning journey, and to prepare students for the assessment tasks. We then break each week down into five steps:

1. The Introduction to the week, setting the context and linking back to prior knowledge where appropriate.
2. The new information they need to understand for the week (knowledge acquisition).
3. The Task, which will contextualise the knowledge and allow them to apply it in a more tangible way (following our active learning principles).
4. Reflection, providing structured opportunities for students to reflect on what they have learned.
5. The Summary, where teaching staff will review what has been learned this week and explain what to do to prepare for the next week.

Each type of activity is represented using different colours on the storyboard, to allow us to gauge the types of resources and tools that will be in use, as well as indicate the activities that the students are being asked to complete.

Weekly Storyboarding

Once the overview storyboard is complete, teaching staff expand it into a more detailed weekly storyboard. Here, they can add an outline of their reasoning and the aims of a task. They cabn define the learning types and the associated activities that will be in place in that week, supporting this with their aim and reasoning for this block of work and the tools that may need to be implemented to set it up. All of this preparation serves to add clarity to the purpose of an activity, and also to rationalise the process. This all informs the next stage of the process, which is writing the content for the Blackboard module pages.

Writing for Blackboard

Based on the weekly storyboard and its deeper dive into the week with more detail and context, teaching colleagues put together the student-facing narrative using a document template. The intention of this document is for it to be the place for all the student-facing text to be prepared, and doing it in a familiar tool like Microsoft Word means that focus is on what is written and how it structures the students’ time, not the appearance or formatting within Blackboard, or imagery (this is all dealt with later). 

Teaching staff create the first draft of the week’s text, which will welcome students to each week, explain the format of the week, and direct students to activities, readings, resources, and support. This is particularly important for online programmes where ‘live’ teaching is very limited. Structuring active learning tasks and activities allows peer-to-peer and student-to-instructor interactions, as well as independent learning to take place. The Digital Learning Development team review this first draft, acting as a critical friend and adding comments on clarity, purpose, pedagogic approach and the student perspective. Logistics around the tools and the workflows are considered here too, to ensure that the focus is always on what students are learning and that the tools and technology do not become a barrier to taking part in activities.

This template document is structured to mirror the storyboard, with the 5 steps each represented where the activities, aims and reasoning, resources, and tools can be mapped out alongside the narrative.

Resource Creation

The writing stage provides the structure for the week; once this is in place teaching staff move on to creating the supporting resources and materials. For a fully online programme, with limited live teaching, students will regularly acquire knowledge and skills through resources and materials within the online environment, contextualised through the narrative. So, to piece the narrative and activities together supporting resources are created – these can take the form of videos, worksheets, discussions, collaborative tasks, interactive activities, and more. For standard ‘lecture’ type videos, academic colleagues create a slide deck using a PowerPoint template. We use a different ‘Durham brand’ colour for each module so that the materials in each module are consistent and we use the Cameo feature in PowerPoint for module tutors to record their presentations.

To cater to the executive market for this programme we ensure that all materials represent the corporate brand of the University and maintain consistency across all the modules. Along with high standards for accessibility and quality of learning materials, this highlights that participants are studying for a Durham degree even when they do not attend campus.

We also use the Accessibility Checker within the software to make it as accessible as possible. These checks allow us to ensure that any accessibility tools, such as screen readers, can interpret images and sequence the content in the order it is intended to be read.

Build

Once the narrative (writing) and resources have been finalised the Science Digital Education team pull it all together in Blackboard. Each week is organised into Learning Modules which are broken down into the 5 steps: Introduction, Learning Materials, Learning Activities, Reflection, and Summary. Using the writing document, the student-facing text (narrative) is copied into its relevant section on Blackboard, with appropriate formatting and resources inserted where required. Instructions are provided for learning activities, formative quizzes are built, discussion forum and journal links are created.

Each slide deck recording has a downloadable version of the slides, and every video has captions and a downloadable transcript.

Review and Sign-Off 

After the Science Digital Education team have finished building the week in Blackboard, it is reviewed by the week’s tutor. Any changes or corrections that need to take place are carried out by the Science Digital Education team before sign-off can take place. Because the Overview Storyboard has been outlined at the very beginning of this process, we know that what is covered in this week should not need substantial changes as any duplications or overlap has already been addressed; however, tweaks can still be made if needed before the module launch. 

The week’s status is updated to ‘Complete’ in Loop to indicate that no more work needs to be done and focus can move on to the next week.

Launch

Every week is completed, reviewed, and signed off before the module launches. This means that during the weeks that the module is taught the teaching team has a set plan for how they will support the students, as planned out in the weekly storyboard and refined during the writing phase. Without the added pressure of designing and building materials and activities while teaching is taking place focus is purely on supporting students.

Evaluation and Enhancements

Each student is asked to complete a module feedback survey towards the end of the module and their feedback is analysed, along with data from Blackboard including engagement, viewing, and access statistics, and the teaching team’s feedback about how they feel the module went.

Using the feedback and data, decisions about changes, enhancements, updates and corrections can be made and implemented before the module next runs. We allow around 12-16 weeks for this process to take place, and we manage these enhancements using a similar process in Microsoft Loop.

Any major corrections that are required during the delivery of the module will be implemented by the Science Digital Education team immediately.

A Brief Overview of the Module Development Process

1. Overview Storyboard & Assessment
   The module teaching team plan out each week of the module and the module assessment. They determine a topic or theme for each week and outline the key objectives for the week’s: Introduction; Knowledge Acquisition; Task; Reflection; and Summary. Assessment is also planned at this stage, and assignment briefs are written.
   
2. Weekly Storyboard
   Based on the overview storyboard plan, the teaching team add more detail. Here, they will add the rationale for each activity, outline the learning objectives for them, and make notes about any guest lecturers and external resources.
   
3. Module Writing
   This is a fundamental part of the development process where the teaching team write the student-facing narrative. This is what the students will read in the VLE and how the students will know what they need to do.
   
4. Resource Creation/Curation
   At this stage, the teaching team will create their teaching materials. These may be recordings of presentations, interviews, worksheets, quizzes, collaborative activities etc.
   
5. Build
   Once the writing and resource creation is complete, the Science Digital Education team will pull everything together and build the week in the VLE; using the writing, and adding the resources where appropriate within the text.
   
6. Review and Sign-Off
   The week’s build is quality checked by the Science Digital Education team and the teaching team to confirm everything is pedagogically sound, accessible, and of a high standard before it is signed off as complete.
   
7. Launch
   The module is released to students and taught over the required amount of weeks. The Science Digital Education team are on hand to help with the delivery.
   
8. Evaluation and Enhancement
   Students feedback about their experiences of the module, and alongside their comments and analytic data from the VLE the teaching and Science Digital Education teams tweak and enhance the module before it next runs.
   

Next Steps

If you want to find out more about programme and module development, or have a project in mind, please contact us.

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1. What is a Microsoft Loop Workspace?
   Microsoft Loop workspaces are like virtual hubs for you and your team, where all the important project details come together. With shared spaces, it’s easy to keep track of what everyone is working on, catch up on progress, and stay focused on your shared goals. ↩︎
2. What are Microsoft Loop Pages and Subpages?
   Loop pages are like flexible canvases. They allow you to bring people together with all your components, links, tasks, and data. You can easily share loop pages across various M365 apps by sending a link or embedding a Loop component. In Loop pages, you can,
   Type “/” to explore content types you can insert
   Type “@” to mention people or link a file
   Type “:” to open emoji picker ↩︎