Project Management in Instructional Design

The Importance of Project Management

The process of course design for any given course, itself, is a project. Thus, an instructional designer should possess strong project management skills to successfully complete a course development. In my own course design projects, I am able to bring a project management process that articulates project deliverables clearly, provides frequent and detailed project updates-typically on a weekly basis, and provides transparency to faculty about the overall status of the project. By employing such an effective project management process, I am able to help faculty to continually see the great strides they are making to finalizing their course throughout the semester and, ultimately, assuaging their fears about their own ability to complete such a project on time.

An infographic depicting the project management process of setting an agenda, holding the meeting, sending a follow-up email, and sending a weekly pivot report

What is my project management process?

I have found in order to make the best use of both the faculty’s time and mine during the course design process, it is best to set an agenda for every meeting. Typically, these meetings take the form of a quick update, followed by some decision making, then working on course items together, and, finally, identifying next steps. After a meeting, I will send out a quick email that delineates the ODEE tasks going forward from the faculty tasks for the coming week. On these emails, I will carbon copy any relevant team members from the Multimedia or Carmen Tools teams. Then, at the end of the week, I will send out a PDF copy of the pivot report. This pivot report provides the faculty a snapshot of the progress of the overall course design.

VIEW EXAMPLE AGENDA


VIEW EXAMPLE FOLLOW-UP EMAIL


VIEW EXAMPLE PIVOT REPORT

In the pivot report, you’ll note the different epics: Project Management, Course Design, Instructor-Created instructional content, Carmen and tool Set-up, and ODEE produced multimedia. Starting in AU ’18, I’ve begun including the to-do tasks for faculty under the “instructor-created instructional content” epic with their initials in brackets. I’ve found that the faculty like to see these items on the reports as a reminder of what they should aim to accomplish.


OTHER PROJECT MANAGEMENT ITEMS

Course design is a collaborative, team effort. With a team effort, comes increased personnel each with their own time demands and constraints. For example, the DE Multimedia team and the Media Services team have limited time to capture video when out on site videos. As such, I’ve developed some worksheets for instructors to populate with details about the upcoming shoot so that both the DE Multimedia and Mediaservices team have a structure plan for filming on-site. This ensures that the faculty capture what they want for their course while also making the most effective and efficient use of other teams’ time.

PHARM 8170 – Wexner Center Walkthrough Worksheet: Template

PHARM 8170 – Wexner Center Walkthrough Worksheet: Instructor Populated