Back in 2016, we started work on the first ever curriculum for STEM community managers – initially delivered via our Community Engagement Fellows Program while CSCCE was getting started at AAAS. Right from the outset, we were using the words “modular curriculum”.
In this post, CSCCE’s Director, Lou Woodley unpacks i) what we mean by a modular curriculum, ii) how different modules can create different “flavors” of learner experience to retain engagement across the overall curriculum, and iii) what benefits and opportunities come by designing in a modular way.
i) What do we mean by a modular curriculum?
When we refer to a modular curriculum, we mean the specific collection of different training components (such as orientation and onboarding activities, workshops, courses, and learner-led quarterly skills shares) that combine to build to the overarching learning goals of the curriculum as a whole. You can think of modules as building blocks in an overall structure that is the learning program.
Modules can differ in format and in length, but each module typically addresses a discrete set of learning goals which, in combination, lead to the program’s overarching learning goals. In our case, the full set of modules builds to a mastery of the different concepts and frameworks that we believe are the critical foundation for STEM and STEM-adjacent community managers.
Often with modularization there comes some flexibility (more on that below!), such as the ability to take some, or all, of the modules in whatever order is convenient for the learner, because the interconnections between modules are made clear in all directions. Sometimes, that isn’t possible; some modules are designed to precede others, creating some rigidity (or a series of guideposts) in the overall learning program structure. In our case, the Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals (CEF) course is a prerequisite to enter the Community Manager Certification Program because it introduces CSCCE’s core frameworks, which we consistently refer back to throughout the various modules of the Certification Program.
ii) Each of our modules has a standard approach but distinct styles
When we conceptualized CSCCE’s Community Manager Certification Program, one of the things that was top of mind was how to sustain an enjoyable and engaging online learning experience over many hours in the virtual classroom.
Thanks to the shift online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a translation of the popular teaching style of presentation followed by small group work followed by debrief into what we lovingly call the “concertina style” of running Zoom meetings: Start in the main room, put participants into breakouts for small group work, and then come back to the main room to debrief and introduce the next concept, likely repeating this formula a couple of times during a single session.
However, while this concertina style supports an active classroom in the sense of enabling participants to interact in small groups and surface reflections to the main room, we wanted to add an additional and distinct “flavor” to each course so that our learners didn’t feel like they were individually and repeatedly dancing in and out of breakouts for many months!
Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals (CEF)
For our foundational course, CEF, the flavor is a deep emphasis on the cohort-based learning experience – spending time building shared language and mental models through collaborative, reflective activities, while also showing how theory can be effectively converted into practice by building towards a final output – a lightweight community engagement plan.
More about CEF
During the course, which is very high-touch from a teaching perspective, we showcase a range of different facilitation tools including:
- A scavenger hunt social hour
- Silent doc-ing activities in the virtual notes to surface individual reflections
- Small group work in breakouts with question prompts to answer
- Worksheets to support the direct application of frameworks
- Discussion of homework readings in the main room
- The use of case studies to show concepts in action
- An avatar-based poster session prior to final graduation
We believe this approach serves to provide a sense of connection to others and reusable example approaches and tools that will continue to support and inspire learners, even if their journey ends here.
Creating Community Playbooks (PBK)
In our Creating Community Playbooks course, we designed an experience that focuses on supporting learners in workshopping a project (in this case, wrangling lots of documentation into shape!) in a cohort-based setting, removing or reducing the overwhelm and loneliness that often accompanies such projects and creating peer-to-peer opportunities to right-size the project.
More about PBK
By introducing a framework for scoping out what is needed in terms of higher order documentation, and then providing reusable templates, case study examples, and class time for creation and show-and-tell, the course helps learners to get practical really quickly, pre-empting how to work around pitfalls and with the benefit of collective wisdom made visible.
CODE – Content Design
Many community managers are designing and creating content and hosting activities (programming) that support their members in connecting with one another around their shared purpose. We touch on this importance of content as a catalyst in the CEF course and then expand on it in much more detail in Content Design (CODE).
More about CODE
- CODE is less about thinking about HOW to write and more about how to construct individual communications and campaigns of multiple related communications in such a way to support different needs and goals.
- This is intended to prioritise strategy – something often lacking in unofficial communications roles – as well as provide the tools and frameworks to advocate for it to others.
The flavor here highlights getting comfortable with giving and receiving feedback on each other’s approaches and growing confident in adapting frameworks quite directly for your own needs.
Nurturing Online Communities (NOC)
For our Nurturing Online Communities course – one of the elective courses in our Certification Program – we wanted to take a deeper dive into social science approaches to community management and online behavior, by specifically connecting theory with design thinking. Most community managers are trying to shepherd behavior change in some way, and having an understanding of the benefits and limitations of a social science approach can be a valuable lens to view the work.
More about NOC
In terms of the practical experience of the course, we wanted to find a way to bridge between quite a dense course text and collaborative troubleshooting sessions rooted in user-centered design. We ended up taking a partially flipped classroom approach and made pre-work videos to summarize key concepts from each chapter of the book – with one chapter covered per week – enabling lesson time to be spent on reviewing questions. In the second half of each week’s lesson (as in all our courses, this is the first of two live sessions per week), we then move to exploration and implementation of the key ideas through a CSCCE activity. For the duration of the course, learners are assigned into teams, and in the second session of each week, a Co-Lab, they take turns leading a design lab in which they collaboratively figure out how to use the concepts from each week’s chapter to solve a problem in their own online community.
Project Management for Scientists Bootcamp (PMB)
In our Project Management for Scientists Bootcamp training, as for the NOC course, we returned to the idea of working in teams for a significant portion of the course. This time, we used pre-made case studies to enable teams to apply different elements of a framework to the case study.
More about PMB
This supports a few things: FIrst it enables exploration during the debriefs of how project management does not have to be a one-size-fits-all approach and how personal experience and project context can influence the choices of what we do next. One team may choose one approach to a case study based on their own assumptions, while another team may interpret it in a subtly different way. And secondly, this approach models some of the challenges of real-life project work working with people you likely don’t know well. Team members may need to miss a session, or have differing opinions on the approach that should be taken, and so there are micro-opportunities to notice those dynamics outside of the regular workplace environment.
By additionally creating the opportunity for learners to apply the framework to their own personal project – and choose whether to work on that alone or to engage in live discussion with the facilitators and peers – we strongly emphasize learner agency in this course, mirroring how project managers often cycle in and out of different configurations with the project team during a project.
iii) Benefits of modularization
Creating a curriculum as a series of modules has several major benefits – especially for a non-profit seeking to support the professionalization of a specific way of working, while also providing flexible revenue-generating opportunities.
a) Self-reinforcing frameworks and language
From an instructional design perspective, we know that people rarely learn from a single encounter with an idea – they tend to refine their relationship to a framework or new language through practice. That can look like trying to apply it to their own context, talking through the framework with others to examine assumptions in more detail, and testing out making minor modifications as they gain confidence. This results in a learner adopting a new approach that feels comfortable and easy to use independently once the training ends.
We try to design for this across our modular curriculum – providing opportunities to practice implementation directly in the training as soon as we introduce the framework and terminology. But we also show where the framework is applicable when it comes up adjacent to another new concept in a different module. This enables reinforcement of language and frameworks across the curriculum as a whole.
One example of this is how we approach our “Designing for effective decision-making during virtual meetings” Mini-workshop. In this 2-hour training session we not only introduce several decision-making frameworks, but we also emphasize how decisions are part of a longer journey for a group – and that clear communication is important for propelling that journey. That leads us to naturally mention the concept of the different informational roles of community-engaged content we define during our Content Design (CODE) course.
We may blog more about how the timing of trainings can impact how obvious the connections between concepts are – and how quickly synthesis and integration of the core concepts occurs for the learner – something we’ve been paying attention to across our learning portfolio.
b) Individual components can be delivered as standalone modules – providing opportunities for private trainings
One of the most common challenges for non-profits is working out how to get the maximum impact from a single deliverable, or how to design things that can be reused multiple times and maybe in multiple contexts. CSCCE’s training modules are a great tool for this – they enable us to deliver them as a connected journey in the form of our Certification Program, and also to offer individual modules as general registration trainings or as private cohorts for clients.
c) Individual modules can be remixed into specializations
A related benefit of a modular curriculum is that it can also be remixed into different configurations – something we are now exploring in much more detail as we consider what the v2 of our Certification Program might look like.
We’ve already created packages of different trainings for clients, for example by combining several Mini-workshops into a specific journey through a related set of ideas – such as planning virtual meetings and how to support collaborative decision-making.
Now, we’re thinking more about how, as the STEM community management field becomes more established, and roles become more distinct and differentiated, the needs of different learners start to emerge as learning journeys that may overlap in some places and diverge in others. Community management in STEM has evolved a lot since we started building trainings in 2016. For example, while CEF remains a foundational course relevant for everyone, the CODE course may be more relevant for online community manager and program manager-type roles, whereas a community engagement professional leading a multi-stakeholder project team may be more in need of project management training combined with facilitation and/or teaming skills. We’re excited to share more about what we’re learning about these journeys soon.