During the Design Phase, you’ll work on redesigning your course for flex-hybrid instruction: finalizing your syllabus, crafting your assignments, building the course modules in Canvas, choosing other instructional technologies you want to use, and planning your delivery model. The amount of time this takes can vary widely, so start early!
The Design Check-In
The Milestone for the Design Phase is the Design Check-In. In this meeting, you’ll discuss your plans for your courses and how to make them a reality. While you do not need to have your course built prior to the meeting, you should have done some thinking about your plans for flex-hybrid, reviewed your past versions of the courses, etc. This Guide to Preparing for the Design Check-In may help.
The form of the meeting varies depending on whether you decided to go through the ramp-up process with peers or through CLT Design Team one-on-ones during your Kickoff Meeting. Full-time faculty should have their Design Check-Ins by July 15. Part-time faculty should aim for no later than July 31.
Peer Design Check-In
If you are using the peer-supported process organized by a Team Lead from your program or division, this will be a meeting with a peer. You can use this time to exchange ideas, get feedback, and ask each other prompting questions that will help both (or all) of you stay on track with your timelines. Your Team Lead will provide you with suggestions about what to discuss, similar to the following:
A guide with suggested questions is available here.
Your Team Lead will also let you know the process for confirming that you’ve had your Design Check-In. You are encouraged to meet with your check-in partner(s) multiple times if it’s helpful to you, including a meeting to exchange peer review at the end of the phase. You may also schedule a meeting with the Design Team if you have a specific need.
Design Team (CLT) Check-In
If you are going through the process with the CLT-led Design Team, your Design Check-In will be a one-on-one meeting with a faculty or staff member who has special expertise in course design and educational technology (list at the bottom of this page). This meeting will cover the same general topics listed in the infographic above, with opportunities for more formal design coaching. You will be able to schedule follow-up meetings as needed.
If you are going through this version of the process and have not yet signed up for your Design Check-In, you can do so here.
During the Design Phase
What happens during your Design Phase will depend greatly on how many courses you are teaching, whether you have taught them in a remote, partly remote, or flex-hybrid format before, and your general familiarity with tools like Canvas. Even if you are an adept Canvas user with robust remote past shells already built, you should use this time to consider how delivery and assignments may change in a flex-hybrid setting. We strongly recommend that every faculty member consider how they might adapt and grow their teaching.
You can begin with the materials we have developed on the “big picture” of excellent course design, including:
- what flex-hybrid means in practice
- the Backwards Design process (a great way of ensuring that your adapted course is outcomes-oriented)
- the “flipped classroom” (a model for encouraging student engagement and participation during synchronous time)
- and more!
Continue by thinking about teaching strategies. Our offerings include materials on designing your course that are relevant to all kinds of classes and include:
- building classroom community in remote learning
- scaffolding your teaching and assignments
- creating a dynamic syllabus
- using Canvas templates
- and more to come!
We also have resources available on enhancing accessibility, equity, and inclusion, educational technology, and focused advice for designing lecture-based, discussion-centered, and project-based courses.
So where to start? We recommend beginning on the Approaching Course Design page with the video on the flex-hybrid model. The video also includes an introduction to Backwards Design. On the same part of the page, you’ll find a more detailed article on Backwards Design and a fillable document template that will walk you through the entire BD process in a way that parallels your syllabus and Canvas Modules structure.
If you have used the Backwards Design model in the past, you may wish to start with the Guide to Preparing for the Design Check-In, which will be useful for both the peer and CLT Design Team paths.
Design Phase Leadership
Design Team Members
- Betsy Allen-Pennebaker (Core Faculty)
- Freddy Angel (CLT)
- Josh Blumberg (Academic Technology)
- Barbara Colombo (EHS Faculty)
- Jonathan Ferguson (CCM Faculty)
- Murat Gungor (ITS Faculty)
- Johnna Herrick-Phelps (Champlain College Online)
- Rebecca Mills (CLT)
- Albert Orbinati (Champlain College Online)
- Caroline Toy (CLT)
- Mark Zammuto (Career Collaborative)
Peer Team Leads
Communication and Creative Media
- Warren Baker
- Amanda Crispel
- Suzanne Glover
- Nancy Kerr
- Joseph Manley
- JoAnn Patel
- Robin Perlah
- Eric Ronis
- Tanya Stone
- Rosalynne Whitaker-Heck
- Van Dora Williams
Core
- Miriam Horne
- David Mills
- Kristin Novotny
- Craig Pepin
Education and Human Studies
- Patti Aldredge
- Barbara Colombo
- Valerie Esposito
- Eric Friedman
- Bjarne Holmes
- Kathryn Leo-Nyquist
- Tony Perriello
- Julian Portilla
- Faith Yacubian
Information Technology and Sciences
- Melanie Brown
- Frank Canovatchel
- WeiKian Chen
- Adam Goldstein
- Brian Hall
- Yogesh Khatri
- David Kopec
- Dean Lawson
- Devin Paden
- Kathy Seiler
Stiller School of Business
- Cathy Duffy
- Cyrus Patten
- Ben Wiley