Collaborative Online Professional Development Design
Authors: Cochrane Thomas , Arkoudis Sophia , Benevento Cathleen 
Published: February 2021

COVID-19 has impacted not only higher education teaching practice, but also professional development (PD) such as F2F workshop sessions for supervisor training have had to pivot to online modes. This presentation overviews the process of designing an academic supervision training workshop as an online module that can be used as a design framework for other professional development and training contexts. We used a design-based research methodology (McKenney & Reeves, 2019) encompassing three stages.

Stage 1 Evaluation and Analysis

We formed a collaborative design team of two academics and a professional staff member and met regularly over Zoom as due to COVID-19 we were all working from home, and across countries (Australia and New Zealand). We began with an evaluation of the existing introductory supervision online module to identify key design elements and refinements that we could integrate into the new refresher module. This was followed by a collaborative definition of the scope of the new PD module that was focused upon providing a ‘Refresher Course’ for experienced higher degree research supervisors. We decided to focus the content of the module upon authentic user-generated scenarios from highly experienced academics across the university. User reflection was designed through an optional link to contribute to an institutional Wiki page to provide tips and comments from user experiences in supervision. The analysis of users needing an informative but short time investment in the refresher module highlighted the need for collating resources that would be referenced throughout the module to be made available at the end of the module as a downloadable interactive PDF resource for users.

Stage 2 Collaborative Prototype Design

An initial storyboard module prototype based upon learning object and instructional design principles (Boyle, 2003; Author1, 2007; Reigeluth et al., 2016) was created. While we began with big ideas based upon the rapid prototype of how to make the new module interactive and appealing to the users there were significant design restraints imposed by the institutional Course Builder online development platform, that provides a basic Web 1.0 approach to online module design and delivery. This meant that user interaction options were limited, file size uploads were small, and display dimensions fixed. Therefore, Vimeo was used to host and embed the video vignettes in the module pages through an institutional license providing a range of privacy and customisation options. We were able to negotiate these technical design hurdles, albeit with downgraded expectations of user interaction within our new module design.

Stage 3 Evaluation and Redesign

User feedback on the initial prototype was very positive and the user-generated video vignettes and funky iPad created graphics were highlights. Feedback also highlighted the need for additional user instructions, a more unified design across the module and implementation of accessibility features such as closed captioning for the video vignettes. This was achieved through maintaining a consistent font and paragraphing style and creating a new embedded player style format for the Vimeo video host platform. Closed captions were added by manually transcribing and timecoding the videos on Vimeo.