I have led cohorts of faculty in communities of practice as they collaboratively explore fundamental concepts and skills needed to design and create successful online and blended courses. Most recently, I have facilitated a 10-week blended/hybrid course design program asks faculty to reflect on the following weekly questions in order to prepare a design project that they present to their colleagues for feedback:

1. Why would I incorporate technology into my course?

2. What do I want students to be able to do?

3. Who are my students, and what particular needs do they have?

4. How can I prepare my students to succeed?

5. Which technologies work best for my design?

6. How would I know if my students have succeeded?

7. How do I decide which lessons go online, and what happens in the classroom?

8. How do I bring all my content and activities together in Canvas?

9. How do I create effective online course content?

My excellent colleagues in the Center for Digital Learning & Innovation (CDLI) at Seattle U had been facilitating a faculty course design program for a few years before I joined the team. They had assembled a custom rubric for evaluating online course quality. The rubric combines standards from the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm, a surprisingly relevent yet almost 500 year old practice within Jesuit education, with contemporary adult learning theories. CDLI had also secured sponsorship from the Provost and faculty assembly to require reviews of all online courses using our rubric as a guide. I had the opportunity to contribute to the course design program during my first summer in CDLI in what became an annual summer redesign.

My initial contributions to the course design program centered on helping faculty conceptualize the right "blend" of online and classroom learning in hybrid/blended courses. I had previously developed resources on blended and flipped classroom designs at The University of Iowa to support faculty designing courses for newly-created active learning classrooms. Active learning holds great potential, but it presents a fundamental problem

What good is an "active" classroom if students aren't prepared to dig deep into course concepts during class?

This is a problem for faculty teaching in any modality, but it's especially clear when students aren't prepared to participate in technology-enabled rooms designed specifically for this purpose. At Seattle University, I shared a selection of blended course design readings with my instructional designer colleagues, and we quickly started working on what became known as the Blended Flow Toolkit.

Together, our team synthesized existing research and theoretical models to create a flow of learning categorized into four stages:

Set Stage
Explore
Dig Deeper
Wrap up

Each stage contains sub-steps. For example, Set Stage includes:

Triggering Event
Preparatory Exploration
Preliminary Meaning Making
Preliminary Check for Understanding

Each sub-step provides ideas for learning activities in both online and classroom modalities. Each activity lists the PROS and CONS of facilitating the activity online or in the classroom. Additionally, we suggest tools for each activity and provide links to help resources for these tools.

We presented the toolkit to the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) directors, and subsequently published a case study on Seattle U faculty's use of the toolkit in an ELI Brief entitled, Innovating with Purpose: The Blended Flow Toolkit for Designing Blended/Hybrid Courses. The toolkit is available on the web for anyone to use. We have received positive feedback and thanks from instructional designers around the world, including the Stanford Office of Medical Education, American University Washington College of Law, James Cook University (Australia), University of Turnbull - Institute for Interactive Media and Learning (Australia), and the University of Lethbridge (Canada). The toolkit was included in the 2019 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report and is featured on the EDUCAUSE resource page for Blended Learning.

Check out the Blended Flow Toolkit for yourself!

How does student empathy mapping help?

• It reveals the underlying “why” behind students’ actions, choices and decisions to proactively design for their real needs, the needs that are difficult for students to perceive and articulate.
• It sticks. It invites faculty to internalize parts of the students’ experience in ways that reading student evaluations cannot.
• It paves the way for innovative learning design. Upon completing this exercise faculty have more fully internalized the context of students in their course. With this deep understanding, it's easier to see how slight course design changes can make a big impact on student success.

There are likely at least three or four types of students that need help to do better in a class. I ask faculty to choose the type of student that they're most worried about. For example, one type of student is conscientious but keeps getting tripped up by key concepts. Maybe this student runs out of steam at exactly the wrong time. Faculty can make better design decisions when they remember their students' needs as they get deeper into the weeds designing and building their online courses.