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Randall Fullington has been my go-to colleague to learn about online degrees at scale. At CU Boulder, Randall is the assistant vice provost and executive director of academic and learning innovation.
When I saw on LinkedIn that Randall is recruiting a senior learning experience designer for the Office of Academic Learning and Innovation, I thought the gig would be a good fit for my new series on academic innovation gigs.
Q: What is the CU Boulder’s mandate behind this role? How does it help align with and advance the university’s strategic priorities?
A: CU Boulder has made it a strategic priority to be a top university for innovation. At the same time, our Academic Futures initiative identified a universitywide goal of expanding access to education through online offerings. This role will help us achieve both of those priorities.
The senior learning experience designer will collaborate with faculty, degree program staff and a team of learning designers to create scaled online courses hosted on the Coursera platform.
To date, our noncredit courses have reached nearly three million noncredit learners across the globe, while our for-credit programs have pioneered a true performance-based admissions model for graduate degrees.
This role will also be tasked with exploring innovation opportunities internally and externally. Our senior learning experience designers participate in CU Boulder’s online community of practice and are given multiple opportunities to present their work at local and national conferences.
Q: Where does the role sit within the university structure? How will the person in this role engage with other units and leaders across campus?
A: This role sits within the Office of Academic and Learning Innovation, a unit housed within the Division of Academic Affairs. From this position, ALI has unique opportunities to collaborate with faculty and instructors from every college, school and many institutes on campus.
A key part of this role is to work directly with faculty to design noncredit and for-credit courses, which ALI approaches as an opportunity to think about transformative pedagogy in all modalities.
Beyond these one-on-one interactions, the role will also have opportunities to work with program staff and administrators to launch new degree programs and refresh existing programs. ALI maintains close partnerships with our scaled online degree programs including data science, computer science, electrical engineering and engineering management, and we encourage cross-program collaboration, research opportunities and community building.
Q: What would success look like in one year? Three years? Beyond?
A: The specific person for this position will need to have experience in programming to help ALI support faculty with their technically focused assessments—think autograders and other scaled assessment techniques.
Success in year one will entail helping ALI move beyond its existing autograding techniques by drawing on emerging technologies to push the boundaries of online assessments for rigor and scale. Our learning design team recently launched an AI for Course Design course on Coursera. This person will be an active contributor in similar projects.
On the relationship side, success in year one will require the person to have established a strong mentoring relationship with ALI’s learning experience designers and student assistants, be a go-to person for faculty collaboration, and become a leading voice in CU Boulder’s online pedagogy communities.
In year three and beyond, the person will have a broader reputation outside of ALI by presenting their work at national conferences, leading conversations about online course development at CU (and not just within ALI) and actively contributing to innovations in online education.
Q: What kinds of future roles would someone who took this position be prepared for?
A: ALI actively works to empower staff to grow in their professional interests. As a unit responsible for implementing lifelong learning, we want our staff to embody that principle by pursuing professional development and learning opportunities. We would like to help this person prepare for their unique personal and professional goals.
More broadly, after a successful tenure, this person would be prepared to manage a learning design group within a university, to work on ed tech initiatives for private industry or to design online program features for institutions.
