Learning Design and Faculty Development Services
From ideation to delivery, including professional development opportunities for your staff, Noodle helps you build beautiful courses.
Noodle has been great at collaborating and finding thoughtful solutions that support our efforts to increase our internal capacity and expertise.
— JOE CAROLL, VICE PROVOST, BOSTON COLLEGE
Agile Program Design
The diversity of schools in Noodle’s partner network helps us carefully evaluate the curriculum design strategies that drive the best student outcomes - including concepts like active learning, work-based learning, and peer-to-peer feedback.
Working with the faculty of a department, our learning architects think through the threads that connect your courses and programs.
Learning Design
A surprising number of online programs reflect antiquated ideas about learning design. Downloadable PDFs and lecture videos is an undifferentiated and ineffective formula for engaging students in meaningful learning. And while the synchronous virtual classroom is a growing feature in many online programs, few schools have well-thought-out strategies for when and how to blend modalities or to equip and support faculty to take full advantage of online possibilities.
Our learning design teams help faculty make strategic choices about engaging ways to present content and make effective use of design resources. Courses are evaluated against our EPIIIC rubric and other data as we strive for ever-improving learning experiences that inspire and delight both faculty and their students. Everything we design belongs to you and may be used in other courses or programs as you see fit.
Make it EPIIIC
We work to ensure that all our courses are EPIIIC:
The quality bar for courses - both in-person and online - is steadily improving, and advances in AI and VR are likely to accelerate this improvement.
And yet, it’s hard to know if your courses are excellent. Building on Quality Matters and other research, we designed a rubric with which to evaluate courses; each time we create or rework a course, we bring it to a panel of professors to score it (we also have them evaluate courses from universities’ internal design teams).
Faculty Support and Development
With all the digital tools now available to instructors, it is arguably the most exciting time in history to be an educator. And also possibly the most stressful.
Noodle works with your staff to make sure they know all of the tools they have at their disposal. This includes, but is not limited to, 1:1 coaching sessions, group training and workshops, and on-demand courses and resources. We even offer specialized programs for faculty interested in building and maintaining online courses on their own.
Accessibility
Noodle courses align with the Universal Design for Learning Principles to ensure that all individuals have equal opportunities to learn. All courses and course materials designed or built by Noodle (and our providers) are compliant with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. The principles are woven into subject matter expert (SME) and faculty orientations and into informal conversations with faculty during the course build process. As a system of checks and balances, learning designers (LDs) identify which principles of UDL are being employed in each course build element by notating this on a course blueprint. LDs also run accessibility checks of courses before they are deployed.
Additionally, all providers that partner with Noodle and all products that Noodle uses must have a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) which evaluates how accessible the product is according to 508 standards. Please see ADA Compliance for Online Course Design for additional information.
Tying It All Together
Noodle works hard to make sure our technology and services are excellent and cost-effective. What makes them unique, though, is our ability to help connect things— online and on-campus efforts, degree and lifelong learning programs, and our university partners themselves–in ways that lower costs and raise responsiveness and engagement. Whether you need strategic thinking, ongoing co-management, or extra hands to implement, Noodle brings this focus on connection to every engagement.
Learn More
