Abstract

Designing high-quality online courses requires specialized skills and knowledge that instructors may not possess alone. To address this challenge, universities employ instructional design professionals to support course design and development. However, it is important to recognize that instructors are significant in higher education course design.
This case study explores instructors’ experiences during the instructional design supported online course designing process. Fifteen instructors from two Canadian universities were interviewed. Three cases were selected based on the ID support modes to allow across-case comparison.
The key findings revealed that instructors designing online courses did not explicitly follow standard ID models. Instead, they prioritized adapting existing course content to suit their needs. When working with IDs, instructors valued ID’s expertise in course formatting and structures, and customized support, offering instructional strategies and digital tools for optimized online courses. Yet how often instructors implemented ID suggestions and practices was influenced by several other factors, including course goals, time constraints, previous teaching experiences, design task complexity, and ID support availability. The study also identified challenges in the current course design process, including balancing instructors’ workloads and desired effective course design, building pedagogical content knowledge in online course design and teaching, and bridging the gap between design needs and available ID supports.
This study provided an opportunity to understand ID-supported course design and how ID suggestions were implemented from instructors’ viewpoints. The results provided insights on how to improve ID support in higher education and help in better understanding the professional identity of instructional designers.