Stephen Abblitt Keypath Education (Australia & Asia Pacific) and Dawn Gilmore University of Melbourne

Partnering with online program managers

In the new book, Partnering with Online Program Managers for Distance Education: Approaches to Policy, Quality, and Leadership, a global team of authors explores aspects of university-OPM partnerships. Through themes such as lessons learned, conflict and criticism, learning design, teaching, and future models, the book addresses the challenges and strategies for making these relationships successful.

As universities unbundle their value chains, they also redefine concepts of academic quality, ownership, and trust. The learning designer-academic relationship, in particular, feels the impact of this unbundling. Learning designers often invest between 200-300 hours in producing a single online subject, navigating the complexities of pedagogy, technology, and quality across complex relationships and various locations.

As the higher education sector leans into OPM models to fill capability gaps, add additional resourcing or optimise scaling, and to meet short-term goals, a deeper understanding of collaborative work with academics is needed. Stephen Abblitt’s chapter, Locating academic quality for online learning in higher education: perspectives from learning design, is a starting point for this conversation and his new research is posed to extend this conversation.

In this blog post, Stephen summarises his chapter and invites readers to participate in further research on this topic.

Learning design as socio-material practice

My chapter begins by describing how learning design is sometimes poorly understood—even more so when learning designers are involved of an OPM partnership, working both within but also outside of universities, somehow both and neither, always in-between.

Like a growing array of ‘third space’ professionals (Whitchurch, 2012), learning designers “toil in the interstices between the more prominent teacher and student narratives” (Costello et al., 2022, p. 1). Learning design is hard to define because it is polysemantic: it refers to a product (i.e., a course, a lesson, a learning activity, a digital or multimedia object), but also a process (i.e., a method, a methodology, work practices), and now also a profession. Effectively, we collaborate with academics and other stakeholders to design, develop, evaluate, and improve learning experience. In the broadest sense, learning design is “not simply … a technical methodology”, nor even only “a socially constructed practice” (Campbell et al., 2009, p. 646)—it is a socio-material practice unfolding within complex networks connecting people, organisations, technologies, materialities, data, and discourses.

Within OPM partnerships, the complexity and ambiguity of these relational effects and agential relations poses a significant challenge for assuring (or, sometimes, even locating the roles and responsibilities for) academic quality—particularly in online learning contexts. Learning designers and the academics they collaborate with are “caught in a constant re/negotiation and re/iteration of what academic quality is for online learning and how best it can be achieved” (Abblitt, 2024, p. 144).

Locating academic quality across partnerships

To better understand these re/negotiations and re/iterations, my chapter presents a socio-material description of the re/location or academic quality for online learning, from the standpoint of a team of learning designers working for a global OPM, Keypath Education. 49 survey responses were collected, providing an invaluable insider perspective sometimes absent from discussions about OPMs.

Respondents reflected on their agency to influence academic quality, describing how roles and responsibilities for academic quality are being redistributed across networks of pedagogical, technological, design, policy, and other expertise. This begins with the foundational relationship between academics and learning designers, but extends throughout increasingly complex university and EdTech ecosystems, and the changing global higher education sector. Respondents also discuss practical strategies for influencing quality, such as advocating for students, shifting attitudes and mindsets, and their role in providing learning and development for academics.

This relocation of academic quality also presents some specific challenge for learning designers’ collaborative work with academics, and respondents identified several systemic barriers to achieving academic quality, such as persistent negative perceptions of online learning, lack of professional development for academics, and systemic issues of academic labour and workloads. The perception was that these issues are not unique to OPMs, but instead reflects more wide-ranging issues arising from changes to traditional academic practices in the neoliberal university.

Expanding horizons: Perspectives beyond OPMs

The practice and profession of learning design is becoming ever more important in the contemporary post-digital university. My new research project looks beyond the narrow scope of OPMs to investigate the broad influence of learning designers across the entire higher education sector, locally and globally. The project seeks to better understand the perspectives of learning designers and related ‘third space’ professionals on their role, their working conditions and work practices, and their contributions to quality and innovation in teaching and learning.

If you’re a learning designer or related ‘third space’ professional and would like to contribute, you can access the survey here: How do learning designers support quality and innovation in higher education?

Partnering with Online Program Managers for Distance Education: Approaches to Policy, Quality, and Leadership, edited by Dawn M. Gilmore and Chinh Nguyen, is published with Routledge.

References

• Abblitt, S. (2024). Locating academic quality for online learning in higher education: Perspectives from learning design. In D. Gilmore & C. Nguyen (Eds.), Partnering with online program managers for distance education: Approaches to policy, quality, and leadership (pp. 139–166). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003387138-10
• Campbell, K., Schwier, R. A., & Kenny, R. F. (2009). The critical, relational practice of instructional design in higher education: An emerging model of change agency. Educational Technology Research and Development, 57(5), 645– https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-007-9061-6
• Costello, E., Welsh, S., Girme, P., Concannon, F., Farrelly, T., & Thompson, C. (2022). Who cares about learning design? Near future superheroes and villains of an educational ethics of care. Learning, Media, and Technology, 48(3), 460– https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2022.2074452
• Whitchurch, C. (2012). Reconstructing identities in higher education: The rise of ‘third space’ professionals. Routledge.