Are You a Course Developer/Subject Matter Expert?
At PACE, our primary goal is to support you in meeting your goals. We view ourselves as partners, helping to guide the design and development of high-quality courses using industry best practices and our own experience. At all stages of the design and development process, we work in tandem, with a well-defined process and helpful tools, so that we can help you meet your goals.
Here’s how our team partners with yours:
PACE Instructional Design Team Guiding Principles
In all course design and development, we observe the following foundational principles:
Courses should be Active
We use principles of active learning to create an experience that invites and encourages students to engage in the learning process, with clear communication around goals and outcomes
Courses should be Engaging
Using best-practice foundations, we design learning experiences that encourage engagement between students and their learning, their instructors, their peers, and the world around them.
Courses should be Innovative
We design learning experiences that utilize the latest tools, techniques, and strategies to keep learners engaged and empowered to meet their own goals.
Courses should be Collaborative
All projects are a collaboration between Subject Matter Experts and instructional design practitioners, with a goal of helping create opportunities for connection and collaboration within the class environment.
Courses should be Inclusive
All students should see themselves in the learning experiences we create and can engage in ways most meaningful and comfortable to them.
Courses should be Learner-Centered
All design and development efforts have the learner experience at heart, from design to go-live. Empowering learners to meet their own goals is our primary mission.
Course Development Phases
The course development process typically follows the phases below:
- PLAN: Discuss shared vision, audience, and outcomes
- DESIGN: Using the PACE Quality Rubric and grounded in best practices, design a course map to show alignments between learning and outcomes
- BUILD: Create the learning materials, and build the course in Brightspace and other tools as appropriate
- REVIEW: SMEs provide feedback on the materials in accordance with agreed-upon milestones
- PILOT: Collect and analyze student/ instructor feedback, and edit as necessary
- MAINTAIN: Make limited-scope edits as needed, with an eye toward continuous improvement
Tools We Utilize
The templates and rubrics below are central to building high-quality programming, and we utilize all of them for each project. The PACE Instructional Design team will work with you to create and update these throughout the design/development process.
What Is a Course Map?
A course map provides an overview of all learning outcomes, activities, and assessments for a course. It is designed to help demonstrate connectivity and alignment between goals and assessments, and to help organize the course into logical groupings of information that help students best learn the material. It is a Microsoft Word file shared between Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and Instructional Designers (IDs), providing a roadmap for design and development.
Why do we use Course Maps?
Course maps provide a way to efficiently blueprint a course, organizing content and ensuring that we meet the goals of the course. These maps offer the following benefits:
- They serve as a living document during the design and development process, offering efficient communication pathways between SMEs and IDs
- They help to show alignments between desired outcomes and activities that help us determine whether those outcomes have been met
- They help us organize the content into logical order and groupings to best ensure student success
PACE utilizes a Course Quality Rubric to be sure we align all design, development, and delivery to industry best-practice standards. This rubric is used as a foundational touchstone throughout the design/development process, and before a course is considered ready for students, it must meet the standards set out in the Course Quality Rubric.
To provide best-practice guidance and ease in development and design, the PACE instructional design team has created several Brightspace templates we rely on as we begin new program and course projects. These templates serve as organizational guides and utilize Brightspace tools that we have found to best support student engagement and success.
Responsibilities
Throughout a 12-week design and development process, the ID Team and project SMEs work in tandem. The information below gives a high-level overview of some of the responsibilities involved in a typical course development project:
With the PACE team, you will set course design, development, and delivery milestones.
Working with a UVM PACE instructional designer, you will determine course-level and module-level outcomes for the course. Those outcomes will determine both the content and the assessment elements of the course.
Once outcomes are determined, you will create a course syllabus using our UVM PACE syllabus template.
Using a UVM PACE template, you will create a course map that includes the following items:
- All course materials, including written text, video content, and links to outside resources
- All activities, with complete instructions (discussion prompts, written assignments, presentations, projects, etc.)
- All knowledge checks and answer keys
- All relevant instructions for ancillary tools, if they will be utilized
Using the Course Map as a guide, you will provide all course items to your assigned instructional designer, and the instructional designer will be responsible for building the course into our learning management system.
Stipends
Course development and redevelopment stipends are based on the predetermined Credit Hour Equivalency of each course, and are paid upon successful completion of the course design and build process. Stipend amounts are as follows:
Course Development
| CHE | Student Engagement Hours | Stipend Amount |
|---|---|---|
| 0.5 | 23 | $1125 |
| 1.0 | 45 | $2250 |
| 2.0 | 90 | $4500 |
| 3.0 | 135 | $6750 |
Course Redevelopment
| CHE | Refresh (Revise <10% of content) | Minor Updates (Revise 11-25% of content) | Major Updates (Revise 26-50% of content) | Extensive Updates (Revise 51-75% of content) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0.5 | $100 | $250 | $500 | $750 |
| 1.0 | $200 | $500 | $1000 | $1500 |
| 2.0 | $400 | $1000 | $2000 | $3000 |
| 3.0 | $600 | $1500 | $3000 | $4500 |
Hiring Documents
Form downloads (PDF, opens in new window)
I-9 Remote Hire Instructions for AUR
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