Last summer I was hired to design an online foundations arts first year program for a college which had only taught online courses as part of the covid emergency pivot response. The faculty had never used an LMS before and part of my work would be to build out what would be their first foray into an LMS with this work.
My contribution from a project management perspective sat within planning and from a design perspective I would consider to be the delivery of a working prototype. I would design the program for the instructors to adopt and run with for the year, starting in the fall two weeks after returning from their break and then they would themselves, with guidance from an in house learning development person make changes for the year after. I find that prototype as the final product is a pattern in my work. It’s interesting to me, and brings up some ethical questions that in most of the design work I have done in post secondary programming there has not been a good prototype and evaluation stage prior to implementation. The prototype is actually delivered to the users (the faculty who are delivering to the students in most cases) and from that initial delivery, and subsequent deliveries adjustments are made with each iteration. I am not sure this would happen anywhere but post secondary public education honestly. I don’t know of a market based product that would be able to go from design to prototype into the market the same way. I have worked as a project manager in other contexts and have never experienced the end user being the test subjects for the prototype to this extent.
When I think back on this scenario I can see a few things that were smart about bringing in an outside course designer for the faculty who would then deliver the program and the decision to do so was probably in response what is described by Conway, Masters and Therold (2017) to avoid the system immune response from cultural norms. The perception of leadership was that the school had fallen into a bit of a rut. That while they were a creative school teaching creative disciplines, the creativity was not extending to how they delivered their programs. They relied heavily on lectures and studio time. Not to say those are bad things but there had not been any radical, out of the box thinking injected into the program for quite some time. The assessment was also there was high resistance to change from faculty.
As Weiner discusses (2009) creating urgency can be one of the conditions that can help prepare organizations to accept change (p.7). Faculty would be teaching online in the fall and they had also been teaching in pandemic emergency teaching for some time, they needed a break and after the summer break they would return just before the Fall semester start and this program would be ready for them to adopt. In the director’s assessment she had considered the culture, values and the current state of overwhelm of the faculty but there was also some urgency for the change to happen, the online program was being delivered in the fall.
A very successful aspect of navigating the expected resistance to this change was in choosing the right faculty for me to work with. I was partnered with a faculty member who had been with the program for many years, who had respect from her colleagues and was also seen as vocal change resistant member of the organization. When she was tasked to be the working partner for my design role it put her in the position of power in the change. She became the person who the faculty would provide materials to, who would get updates from and who was essentially championing the change for the rest of the faculty. She provided me the legitimacy I needed to work with the other faculty stakeholders. Looking back I see this as an astute choice by the director to encourage the adoption of the innovation from those who would be receiving the prototype to carry forward.
Aligning this experience with the complexities of innovation discussed by Conway, Masters and Thorold (2017, p.12) I can see the director’s choice of approaching this work from a systems viewpoint where there was urgency to adopt the new way of teaching and she anticipated resistance to change and overcame that by putting the right people in positions to legitimize it and reduce the largest barrier of resistance cultural norms.
Conway, R., Masters, J. & Thorold, J. (2017). From Design Thinking to Systems Change. RSA Action and Research Centre.
https://www.thersa.org/globalassets/pdfs/reports/rsa_from-design-thinking-to-system-change-report.pdf
Weiner, B. (2009) A theory of organizational readiness for change. Implementation Science, 4(6).
https://doi.org/10.1186/1748-5908-4-67
Weller, Martin and Anderson, Terry (2013). Digital resilience in higher education. European Journal of Open, Distance and e-Learning, 16(1)53.
https://implementationscience.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1748-5908-4-67
March 8, 2022 at 6:17 pm
Hi Karen,
I can only imagine how complex the design process must have been implementing a new project like an LMS at the college level. Your pragmatic reflection on institutional system immune response hits the nail on the head. I especially appreciate your note about a lack of radical ideas and out of the box thinking, as I often meet this pushback in my setting. It’s a strange juxtaposition to be in education and recognize the system barriers that delay change/innovation. Enter the designer, and to your point, it is a wonderful advantage to be able to design, implement, iterate, and reimplement in education, versus other sectors that must negotiate more red tape. It sounds to me like the college understood the urgency for change and was sorting out how to best facilitate its implementation, and that you were an integral part of this process. No surprise here!
Angela
March 8, 2022 at 6:17 pm
Hi Karen,
I can only imagine how complex the design process must have been implementing a new project like an LMS at the college level. Your pragmatic reflection on institutional system immune response hits the nail on the head. I especially appreciate your note about a lack of radical ideas and out of the box thinking, as I often meet this pushback in my setting. It’s a strange juxtaposition to be in education and recognize the system barriers that delay change/innovation. Enter the designer, and to your point, it is a wonderful advantage to be able to design, implement, iterate, and reimplement in education, versus other sectors that must negotiate more red tape. It sounds to me like the college understood the urgency for change and was sorting out how to best facilitate its implementation, and that you were an integral part of this process. No surprise here!
Angela