It is quite a step to move the concurrent design (CCD) process from a technical product to the design of a course (CCeD) and it is even more of a step to move the CCD process online. But this is the aim of the UnderstandIT project and we took our first steps last Friday with our first online session.
We met in Adobe Connect, an online meeting room, and the fear was that the technology would let us down. Not that it wouldn’t work but that the quality of the communication wouldn’t be good enough for us to discuss and note down decisions in an effective way. In CCeD it is important that everyone can be heard so it wasn’t good enough if even one person couldn’t make themselves heard to simply say ‘Well you can listen’. The other critical factor in CCeD is to make ongoing notes of what is happening (what has been discussed, deadlines, responsibilities and decisions) in a transparent way. So the other cornerstone of online CCeD is turning out to be Google Docs which we can see developing in real time and which we can edit also in real time.
The first step in the Osterwalder approach which we are using to develop our business model for the VITAE course, is to conduct a situation analysis in which you identify all the relevant factors affecting your proposed product, in our case the VITAE course, so this is what we did in this first three hour session. Another worry about transferring CCeD from a dedicated room in a university to the online environment was whether the 17 participants could stand to be in an online meeting for three hours. But the meeting was well moderated and we had a 10 minute break in the middle so the prospect of 3 more such meetings before the beginning of June is not so daunting.