I attended the Council on Global Affairs’ International Women’s Day Global Health Symposium. The focus of the day was on the health of the next generation for women and girls locally, nationally, and internationally. The keynote panel focused on new initiatives and challenges with implementation. Rebecca Winthrop, the Director for the Center of Universal Learning at the Brookings Institute, talked about the science of scalability and her project, Millions Learning, which “…explores specifically not just how to improve learning, but how to do so in a way that can be efficiently and effectively implemented at a large scale.” Her comments really resonated with me. Specifically, she emphasized that successfully scaling up means releasing the idea of having a “gold plated” model that can be replicated with fidelity. That model is too complex and requires finesse specific to a particular author. When scaling up, sustainability is the goal. To achieve this, the cookie cutter model will not work. Rather, it is best to identify the core “ingredients” and aim to replicate those and then allow the user to adapt to their particular context. This creates a partnership that allows the program to maintain its essential attributes, but allows the user to “make it into their own” and have some ownership.

Now, Rebecca was referring her comments on scalability to large-scale educational initiatives in developing countries. My project is, well, definitely not going to change the lives of thousands of students and teachers. However, it has many of the same needs and limitations. I am working with ten School of Nursing faculty and 3 assistant directors to create master courses in our learning management system, Desire2Learn (D2L), for each of their programs. The need for this project arose because the School has seen a significant increase in adjunct faculty due new programs and enrollments. Each program must maintain the integrity of the curriculum in order to meet strict accreditation rules, while still upholding academic freedom and allowing for different teaching styles. In order to achieve this, we gained the political will of the faculty by ensuring that these courses would be created by full time faculty and not be prescriptive. Each course was appointed a faculty point person whose expertise is in the particular course subject area. We are calling these new courses, core masters, which is why my ears perked up when Dr. Winthrop talked about focusing in on the “core ingredients” of a program and allowing the user (or local community) to adapt to the context. The core masters are designed around core content that must be covered in each course with suggested assessments. The content is arranged in 10 modules to correspond to 10 weeks in the quarter. Each module has 3 sub-modules: Read, Watch, Assignments. Faculty have the ability to move module content and modify readings, videos/media, and assignments as it makes sense for their cohort of students and their own professional interests. In addition, the instructor can easily change the delivery mode of the course from hybrid to fully online or vise versa. Each core master launches with a homepage that contains several “widgets” with program-specific information and links to student support services. By designing the core masters in a template that has a consistent look and feel and information architecture, both the student and instructor do not have to re-orient themselves each time they open a new course.

Below is a short clip of Rebecca Winthrop at the Council on Global Affairs’ International Women’s Day Global Health Symposium. Her insightful comments around scalability and how to do it effectively were encouraging and affirmed our efforts and the design of the core master project with the School of Nursing faculty. We hope to launch the core master in the Fall 2016, so I will keep you posted!