As I’ve been working with faculty I’ve noticed the blueprinting phase often becomes a point at which the relationship with the faculty member begins to erode. In talking with my colleagues, they’ve had similar experiences indicating they are able to complete a blueprint on a maximum of 50% of the courses they design. This leads me to question the efficacy of blueprinting in higher education contexts. I believe in corporate training, the blueprinting process is a key step in developing professional development resources. However, education is vastly different from corporate. Given the low success rate of this tool, I’ve outlined a few ideas on why blueprints may be a barrier rather than the facilitation strategy they were originally intended to be.
A blueprint is intended to provide a designer with a high-level overview of the key points, objectives, assessments, and media used in an online course. Ideally, a faculty member and a designer work together to talk through each of the lessons and document the relevant details in the blueprint. But realistically, who benefits from this process? The designer. In talking with a number of faculty, they mostly see blueprinting as busywork, merely a hoop to jump through. A task that has been outlined as part of their contract. Even when a blueprint is completed, I’ve often questioned whether or not we actually hit the correct level of detail. This obviously can’t be determined until the course is completed.
A second perspective on why blueprints may serve as a barrier is the fact they provide no real marker of progress to a faculty member. The blueprint phase seems to delay the work a faculty member really wants to focus on, the visible course. I’ve facilitated numerous kick-off/onboarding discussions and in nearly everyone, the faculty member has asked what their course will look like once it’s put online. While we can show them examples of other courses, it’s very different from seeing their own content, their work, in an online space. Blueprints delay this sense of gratification and ownership a faculty member feels in creating their course, and to some degree may cause a feeling of detachment from the course creation process.
While I think there is more to explore around this discussion on the true value of blueprinting in designing online courses for higher education, this is a starting point. One that I look forward to exploring further.