The Road to Quality Course Design at the Alamo Colleges District

Dr. Luke Dowden, Chief Online Learning Officer / Associate Vice Chancellor • Alamo Colleges District

Ever since the implementation of AlamoONLINE, our mission has been clear: to empower our diverse communities for success by building and strengthening each of our five college’s capacity to deliver premier, quality digital learning experiences for students.

Currently, the Alamo Colleges District has over 850 online/hybrid faculty, with that number expected to grow.

I'm proud to say that AlamoONLINE’s road to quality course design has improved each semester with the help of our dedicated team. With AlamoONLINE, we are at the forefront of innovation and most importantly we are data-informed as we identify opportunities for improvement.

It’s part of the same framework that has led the Alamo Colleges District to earn national recognition. Earlier this year, the Alamo Colleges earned the coveted Student Success Award from the American Association of Community Colleges and the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in 2018, marking significant milestones in the district’s ongoing journey to achieve the highest level of student success and performance excellence.

Within AlamoONLINE, we have experienced wins to advance the adoption of educational technology. We see the power of feedback loops and have scaled use with faculty support for the betterment of our students.

Leading the AlamoONLINE team are Rudolph “Rudy” Lopez, Instructional Designer Team Lead for AlamoONLINE. Rudy works with other units and team leads including Kori Schneider, Instructional Technology Manager for the Alamo Colleges District. This collaborative partnership extends to the District faculty development team and to college teaching and learning professionals to advance a host of digital learning innovations that ultimately benefit student success.

All three of us support the Alamo Colleges and our system of five colleges - Northwest Vista College, San Antonio College, Northeast Lakeview College, Palo Alto College and St. Philip’s College - and are fellow technology instructional design and support enthusiasts.

Recently, Kori and Rudy answered a few questions about how they are supporting faculty to design and teach courses that are student-friendly, engaging and meaningful.

Q: How have you been able to support faculty through AlamoONLINE and how has that changed semester over semester?

Kori Schneider: Well, the Instructional Design team led by Rudy and my team have the same functionality, but different aspects. There's that gray line of the faculty support side, but then there's the support side. But over time, we have been able to support faculty together and that has strengthened. Rudy’s team is the face and the best practices in course design using the instructional technology tools that my team supports … they call us in with tickets. We are building and standing it up and then making sure that the instructional designers are trained and have a support mechanism in case they get those really hard questions that are kind of outside of the design piece.

Rudy Lopez: Over time, we have been able to utilize best practices in accessibility too. We also have been able to incorporate third party tools to help faculty deliver their courses easier.

Q: How have you been able to scale AlamoONLINE with faculty support?

Rudy Lopez: We have been able to improve every semester. We have a course design challenge that we initiated in 2020 and we have collected a lot of analytics behind that. We essentially invite several faculty to participate in a Design Challenge, where they work one-on-one with one of our instructional designers to enhance, or update their course designs. Every semester we update our challenge or our initiative based on faculty feedback, then we provide specific workshops for faculty based on that feedback. These workshops can be about accessibility, assessment, engagement, or how to use different tools. Kori’s team rolls them out and we kind of take them and run with them.

Kori Schneider: The design challenges have led to a lot more engaging conversations.

Rudy Lopez: We have been able to scale our communication with each other. Anytime Kori’s team has a question, or vice versa, we respond almost immediately so that makes our jobs easier. We are able to quickly turn around and answer a faculty member’s question because a faculty member might need that information immediately.

Kori Schneider: It is a true collaboration of all different mediums, but I think it has helped with the fact that we're not getting as many tickets.

Rudy Lopez: We are on our ninth Quality Design Challenge & Course Peer Review Challenge this semester and they keep getting better. In addition to inviting faculty to work on their courses, they now get to submit their course for national approval and they receive a certificate, indicating their course has met specific criteria to be considered quality.

Q: What is the feedback you receive from faculty about the help you offer?

Rudy Lopez: There are so many faculty members that really put the effort in and come back and there's also a lot of faculties who continuously come see us and meet with us. It’s amazing! They tell us they have gained a lot of experience and expertise–not only in the tools we use, but in the tools that Kori’s team provides. We do our best to meet faculty at their experience level. Our team doesn't assume faculty knows everything consistently or evenly across colleges.

Kori Schneider: The feedback has been positive. There is a lot more collaboration and a lot more communication to the faculty and that’s exciting. Over time we have been able to help faculty increase their expertise, even with the amount of information they manage during an academic year. There is so much more awareness.

Q: How do you see the future of your role taking shape?

Rudy Lopez: If COVID taught us anything it’s how to streamline, but not forgetting that there is a face to face component sometimes that needs to happen to build relationships. I just see AlamoONLINE getting stronger by continuing to build that balance.

Educational Technology

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