No Size Fits All: Design Considerations for Networked Professional Development in Higher Education

Abstract

This paper develops a framework for design considerations that can be used to analyse or design networked professional development (NPD) in higher education (HE) contexts. The model was developed after reflecting on three professional development (PD) courses, each with facilitators who are academic developers across the African continent. Using a collaborative autoethnographic methodology (Bali, Crawford, Jessen, Signorelli, Zamora, 2015), the three authors reflect on design considerations for different forms of blended and online PD courses, based on their experiences of designing and/or facilitating these interventions and with PD more broadly. We argue that design considerations, such as context, have become more complex and that understanding the dynamics between them are important. We suggest that course designs can be positioned along a range of dimensions, namely: open/closed, structured/unstructured, facilitated/unfacilitated, certified/uncertified, with/without date commitments, homogenous versus autonomous learning path, content vs process centric, serious vs playful and individual vs collaborative. Our design considerations framework is not meant to judge courses or provide a formula for how best to design them, but rather to highlight how courses can be understood on each of the dimensions we identify, and how design decisions place a course in particular positions along the spectrum, depending on context. We noted some relationships among dimensions and links to learning theories. We also identified various tensions that arise in the design of NPD, such as between academic developers' pedagogical advocacy vs. usefulness, the need to maintain volunteerism without exploitation of affective labour, and the struggle to create spaces for agency within institutional rules.