Best Practices and Advice for Growing Your Coursetune Team

1. Start small and don’t rush it.

• Take time to reflect, plan, and document for your future success.
• Gradually build champions first and have them train new users.
• Set aside explicit time to explore and build.

"Coursetune provided me the framework that I needed. I really don't think I would have been able to accomplish what I did had I not been introduced to this product because it liberated me from a mindset and a way of thinking about education. It helped me to visualize how you can design a course. It also gave me the structure, the framework, in which to do it. And so, I mean, it was life-changing."

Michele Pistone, Professor of Law, Villanova University

2. Prioritize and Plan

• Discuss the priority initiatives and where Coursetune will help you met those goals.
• Create a unified vision of success with your team.
• Plan a strategy to build your own case study.

"You're certainly going to bring your own expertise to something, but if you have that global perspective of what the end game is, then I think your students and your colleagues, and you are going to be in a much, much stronger situation to be impactful in the modern economy."

Douglas Owens, Associate Professor of Music, University of Tennessee Martin

3. Document your goals and purpose. Revisit often.

• Start meetings with why you’re doing this and share the bigger picture.
• Only add new users for a specific purpose (to answer a question, to learn more, etc).

“I promise once people see that you're successful, once your colleagues see that you're steadfast in your approach, once institutional leadership sees the quality and the value of your journey with a technology or tool such as Coursetune, they'll follow suit."

Barbara Williamson-Holley, Assistant Director of Instructional Technology & Distance Education, South Carolina State University

4. Know your audience. 

• Be mindful of what other priorities people have on their plates and try to tie this into a solution that helps them with those. 
• Know the challenges and pain points you’re addressing (in the words of your audience).

"One of the reasons why I'm so excited is because I work with faculty every day to try and develop quality courses, and they don't know where to begin. This tool would help them understand why it's so important to articulate those outcomes and to track them."

Erin Czerwinski, Head of Learning Engineering at OLI, Carnegie Mellon University

5. Set clear expectations and timelines.

• Consider a monthly user group meeting.
• Discussions and collaboration are your most valuable tools.
• Technology should be used proactively, not reactively to enable you to meet your goals. 

"You're able to tell the story of a course and the story of a program and to be able to see it at a glance. And I think that's the power of the whole thing”

Andrew Feldstein, Assistant Provost for Teaching Innovation and Learning Technologies, Fort Hayes State University

6. Be ready for new conversations! 

• Talks about tools, technology, and support are important to meeting goals.
• New aha!s create opportunities for transformation.

“This is a place where what faculty value can be highlighted. And it allows us to tell as faculty members a broader story about why we do what we do“

Daniel T. Kline, PhD, Director of General Education, University of Alaska Anchorage