Building Design Capacity for Online and Digital Education at Scale

Episode #158 will highlight a design-first approach to online and digital education taken at the University of Leeds in the UK. Two initiatives will be shared, Curriculum Redefined and the strategic growth of Online Learning. Jeff Grabill, Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Student Education at the University of Leeds, is leading on institutional change and an ambitious strategy to redefine the curriculum for an exceptional student experience. Margaret Korosec, Dean of Online and Digital Education at the University of Leeds, is leading on intentional design for fully online programmes and surfacing the transferability to campus and digitally enabled programmes. To build capacity and provide a reset for a design-first, programme level approach, Niels Floor was invited to facilitate a workshop on Learning Experience Design with a diverse group of academics, designers, technologists. We'll explore how this approach is one of several interventions to build an ecosystem of design at the institution and spark new ways of thinking about online and digital education, what key design principles apply, and how institutions can and should scale this support.

Margaret Korosec is an innovative strategic leader bringing creativity, intentionality, and systems perspective to her leadership in scaling online and digital education. She is the Dean of Online and Digital Education at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom leading on establishing a design ecosystem to support and scale online education and a digitally-enabled student experience. As part of her role, she has academic oversight of the Digital Education Service. The service provides specialist learning design, development, production, media, creative and learning systems management for online and digital education. She led the development of a digital learning accelerator, Helix; a creative space to encourage experimentation, iteration, and exploration fostering sense making of emergent technology and enabling radical internal and external collaboration.

• Online Educa Berlin Keynote: https://oeb.global/oeb-insights/
• OEB Interview with Margaret (Creating an Ecosystem of Design): https://oeb.global/oeb-insights/creating-an-ecosystem-of-design/
• Interview: Inside Track | Expanding online education at Leeds, June 20, 2023, Margaret Korosec, Dean of Online and Digital Education, shares a view on how online degrees support lifelong learning at Leeds.

Jeff Grabill is Deputy Vice Chancellor for Student Education at the University of Leeds. Prior to joining the University of Leeds, Grabill was at Michigan State University (MSU) in the United States for nearly 20 years. He served Michigan State University as the Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning, and Technology. In that role, he was responsible for facilitating innovation in learning and educator professional development via his role as Director of the Hub for Innovation in Learning and Technology. Grabill’s research focuses on how digital writing is associated with citizenship and learning. That work has been located in community contexts, in museums, and in classrooms at both the K-12 and university levels. Grabill is also a co-founder of Drawbridge, an educational technology company.

• Book: Design for Change in Higher Education
• Curriculum Redefined https://www.leeds.ac.uk/curriculum-redefined

Niels Floor, a Dutch LX Design pioneer, is the author of the new book: This is Learning Experience Design - What it is, how it works and why it matters. He is a pioneer in the field of Learning Experience Design (LXD/LX design). In fact, in May 2007, the term learning experience design was coined by him. At the time he started this website, mainly as a resource for the students he taught at Avans University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands. Over the last couple of years there has been a growing interest in learning experience design. So now is the time to turn this website into a platform that supports and connects the global LX Design community. He is on a mission to apply, develop, and promote learning experience design (LXD) around the globe. He believes that well-designed learning experiences can improve people’s lives and contribute to a wise world.

• Homepage: https://www.lxd.org/nielsfloor/
• Book: https://lxd.org/lxdbook/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nielsfloor/

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