Cheers! With the enthusiastic giddiness of a playful puppy, we welcome you to 2022! Our new year’s resolutions are the same every year: bring more joy to your workday, reduce the challenges in designing aligned curricula, and make instructional design visible.
In this year’s review, we’re looking back at the stories and articles we shared. We’re especially highlighting the ones that show that how we achieved our goals.
Instructional Designer voices, Course Archetypes, and Course Unboxings
We started 2021 with Colleen M. Culley’s Course Unboxing video. Her sense of curiosity and ability to see opportunity in her course graph epitomizes the Alignment Mindset we encourage. Her exclamations of joy (“This is magic!”) are what we hope to hear from every instructor when they see their course for the first time in Coursetune.
In 2020, Maria Andersen developed a framework for understanding course architecture groupings called Course Archetypes. In the Spring of 2021, we ran a series of five webinars on Course Archetypes with guest speakers representing each of the five archetypes.
The speakers shared how their discipline treated learning objectives, course outcomes, and skills differently. Watch the entire series here to learn how this impacts course design. If you are a current partner, send us a note in chat to get Maria’s complete series of Course Archetypes.
In March, we went “behind the screens” to amplify the voices of instructional designers (and instructional technologists, learning experience designers, etc.). Rhiannon Pollard’s piece emphasized the critical role of care that instructional designers provide in “Support for the Supportive.” Erin Czerwinski shared a model of understanding instructional design through the scientific method in “Think Like a Scientist.”
Introducing the Curricunaut, spooky curriculum stories, and recipes for delicious curriculum design
In July, we held our annual virtual community event, “Coursetune Camp- Journey of the Curricunauts.” At this event, we premiered our new term, “Curricunaut” While it’s fun to say, it also emphasizes the innovative and exploratory work our partners are doing.
Michele Pistone, a Law Professor from Villanova University, shared her journey in “Becoming a Curricunaut- A Faculty Story.” You can watch all the camp videos in our video library from this and prior years.
As the fall leaves started to turn, we asked, what’s hiding in your curriculum?
There may be mysterious gaps, wretched redundancies, or dark data lurking in your courses. Good thing Coursetune nudges you to create balanced courses with diverse assessments. Coursetune can help you “Mind the Gap” and identify places where you can improve your course design.
When the holiday season started, we gleefully used food metaphors to describe how to use Coursetune to go from preparation to creation in “Mise en Place makes Curriculum Design Delicious.” And although we jest often, we take curriculum design seriously, especially when it comes to academic rigor. In December, we shared how Coursetune can help you “Gain Rigor in Your Curriculum With Visual Instructional Design.”
New Features to meet the challenges of a changing educational landscape
We can all agree that education has seen some upheaval in the last two years. Online learning, seeing a student’s journey in a program, and low enrollments were challenge spaces we focused on in 2021. We released many new features to help you address these areas.
We released a new feature called Variations. With it, you can create multiples of a course to account for different modalities or sections while maintaining the course goals. Mapping sets help you visualize alignment from course goals to program-level outcomes. With the addition of Outcome Scales, you can now label outcome alignment with progressive scales that describe students’ depth with each outcome- from the first introduction to proving mastery. We also introduced a guide for institutions to “Remix Your Curriculum and Rock Higher-Ed Enrollments.”
Our partners share their stories
We also wove in some client success stories and case studies throughout the year. These stories show how Coursteune collaborated with our partners to meet their objectives or drive needed changes from accreditation preparation to aligning culture around student outcomes. For example:
- The University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy shared how Coursetune has transformed their curriculum and approach to teaching.
- The University of Western Ontario incorporated student workers into their educational program redesign and used Coursetune to make learning visible for their future teachers.
- Georgetown’s Nursing Program shifted to student-centric instructional design culture.
- The Galloway School gave us ten reasons they chose Coursetune for their K-12 school.
- At AirU they train future pilots for the US Air Force and make sure consistency and quality are at the forefront of their course by using Coursetune.
- Colorado Technical University’s College of Business and Management described their success in using Coursetune for their accreditation.
- Small team? No problem! American College of Healthcare Sciences wrote a guest post about how two people can maintain a vision and accomplish alignment.
- Ozarks Technical Community College used Coursetune to accelerate their new program design and development.
The curriculum alignment adventure continues
It was a fantastic year for us and we’re so grateful to work with such amazing humans who share our passion for quality education, our Curricunauts!
There’s a lot to be excited about in 2022. We’ll be hosting quarterly community events to bring our partners together and share creative solutions to common challenges. In December, we gathered to discuss using Coursetune for accreditation and saw some unique examples for wowing the accreditors.