Choose Your Own Edu-Venture: Faculty Leading Faculty through SDSU’s Flexible Course Design Institute

SDSU’s response to the changes and new realities brought by the coronavirus pandemic was unprecedented, providing more than 1,100 faculty with flexible, peer-led, customizable, technology-enhanced learning opportunities. While nearly every institution made a knee-grinding pivot in March 2020, SDSU’s approach to training faculty to teach online, the Flexible Course Design Institute (Flex-CDI), was remarkable for its forward-looking “choose your own edu-venture” approach, its iterative design, and collaborative peer-driven facilitation, among other features. This interactive presentation will focus on Flex-CDI’s guiding principles, the data-driven revision process across five sessions of the institute, and the lessons that we’ll carry into the future. We’ll showcase the Flex-CDI Tool-Kit (available on Canvas Commons) and the many ways that the Flex-CDI has ushered in a digital transformation in effective teaching and learning at SDSU. Session attendees will gain a sense of the replicability and scalability of Flex-CDI, the strengths and weaknesses of our approach, and the modality-transcending payoff of the experience for the participants who engaged the institute, and for the faculty and instructional technology professionals who collaborated to make it happen.