How OLC’s Professional Learning Services Support Digital Transformation

Many professionals across a university campus influence how students experience digital learning, so maximizing the impact of their efforts requires collaboration and an institutional perspective for digital transformation. That’s why the Online Learning Consortium (OLC) encourages institutions to have a range of administrators, faculty, staff, and, in some cases, students at the virtual table as they learn how they can enhance digital instruction to improve learning outcomes.

“Digital learning is not just a technology issue, it’s not just a pedagogy issue, and it’s not just a registration issue,” says Dr. Colette Chelf, OLC Director of Grant Projects and Consulting Services. “Everyone working on a campus is contributing to student success in one way or another. Digital transformation is about more than just scaling remote access. It’s about the fundamental redesign of the system for all learners, especially those who are underserved.”

This principle informs all the professional development services that OLC partners with Every Learner Everywhere to provide. A range of partner organizations are involved with developing and delivering these services, but Chelf says one ingredient in OLC’s contribution is to derive valuable insight from more than just those already considered to be among an institution’s most prominent voices.

“All the services really uncover those hidden leaders,” Chelf says. “The staff or faculty — and maybe they don’t have a formal title — who end up becoming  champions for innovation and change.”

The professional development services currently offered by OLC include:

• Designing for Impact: Quality and Equity in Digital Learning — This workshop explores how to design and facilitate impactful digital learning experiences for all learners, emphasizing evidence-based course design and concepts like adaptive learning and continuous improvement. Participants learn how to leverage a variety of techniques and resources to create culturally relevant digital learning experiences.
• Developing a Digital Learning Ecosystem to Ensure Student Success — In this workshop, participants examine digital learning approaches that establish and sustain student success. The training highlights the role technology infrastructure, course modality, funding models, and inclusive practices play in successful course design and examines whether institutions are using these tools effectively.
• Continuous Improvement Strategies for Advancing Quality Digital Learning — This training introduces the fundamentals of quality within the context of digital learning. Workshop participants use a scorecard and other quality assurance tools to review an online or blended course and find areas for improvement, learning ways this information and other data can improve course redesign.

Some aspects of OLC’s services are standardized, with each presented as a four-week, asynchronous workshop series for up to 25 participants from three to five institutions, but the programs are customizable.

“We engage with each institution to make sure that we are meeting their needs as we’re delivering the services,” Chelf says.

Personalizing digital learning

The professional development programs are a result of refining and learning from earlier versions of the services, technical assistance, and research assistance OLC has provided since Every Learner’s founding. But they are in line with OLC’s overall mission, which emphasizes the importance of connecting with learners, whatever the course’s setting or instructional tools.

“Our work at OLC is about humanizing digital learning,” Chelf says. “Students need to feel seen, supported, and empowered, just as they would in a face-to-face class. And, if we’re able to do that, then we’ve done our job.”

The updated services also provide different ways for OLC to team with Every Learner to encourage the “a-ha moments” that Chelf describes as one of the most enjoyable aspects of her work.

“Moving the needle for institutions is the goal,” says Chelf. “We provide the space for institutions to bring their own problems to the table, their own pain points, and then we couple our community of expertise and knowledge to help them actually move things forward.”

Setting the standard

But that movement requires more than just action. It requires new thinking about how to tackle issues related to providing high-quality digital learning. It requires outcomes that make participating institutions the standard-bearers for inclusive education.

And that’s the result Chelf hopes those who participate in the OLC workshops achieve. “It’s a broad mindset shift that participants move from being reactive to being proactive,” she says.

“When thinking about their digital learning ecosystem or their baseline of quality and inclusion and access, it’s about, ‘How can we continuously improve rather than just react?’ I love to see institutions become exemplars, sharing their models and lessons so they can accelerate not only their own journey but also their peer institutions’ journeys.”