Pedagogy and Instructional Design Working Group

Owned by John Mark Walker (Deactivated)
Last updated: Aug 07, 2019 by Olga Stroilova (Deactivated)

(To understand more about working groups, see the list of current working groups and a description of what they are)

This page is a working group proposal that sets out the goals and mission of the instructional design working group. 

Instructional Design Has no Community Home

The Open edX community has traditionally focused on devops practitioners and software developers - those who deploy and run Open edX instances, and those who build software on or with the Open edX platform, respectively. In the past year, we've realized that we missed entire groups of people who have significant and material contributions to make to the community, if we created a place for them: instructional designers. 

Instructional designers (IDs) often work with faculty at their respective institutions, usually in isolation from other groups of instructional designers. Each university has multiple groups of IDs. A growing number of IDs have jumped to industry as companies are beginning to take training and learning more seriously, for customers, employees, and partners. To serve this community, the instructional design working group has the following goals:

  • to create a "home" for instructional designers where they can mentor newer members of the community, trade best practices, and collaborate with others from around the world
  • build out a knowledge base on instructional design for Open edX
  • bring together engineers and IDs to collaborate and improve the ID experience on Open edX
  • improve the ID experience for others and move the craft forward

To that end, this group will be tasked with proposing initiatives that will ease the learning curve for beginning instructional designers and give experienced IDs a place to hone their skills. This working group will write up proposals based on their experience and work with Open edX community leadership to determine the best path forward. 

Meeting frequency: quarterly

Real-time discussions: #pedagogy on the Open edX Slack instance (get an invite here)

Long-form discussions: Web discussion forum (soon to be released) 

Knowledge base: pages on this wiki - in a location dedicated to ID

Working group members

Olga Stroilova (Deactivated) - edX, Ben Piscopo (Deactivated) - edX, John Mark Walker (Deactivated) - edX

Interested: Michelle Torsen - University of Washington, Vincent Laberge - University of Montreal, Matthew Harrington - Appsembler,  Colin Fredericks - Harvard, Gabriel D'Amours - OpenCraft, (ADD YOURSELF HERE with brief intro)