Norma A. Marrun, Ph.D.

“We worked with the NovEduca team as faculty members at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, on two comprehensive course redesigns, one at an undergraduate level and one at the graduate level. Both courses are taught in a variety of formats and through a variety of modalities and the redesign work with NovEduca, though geared for only one format and one modality, has actually been transferrable across all formats and modalities.  

The NovEduca team taught us a lot about how to think more intentionally about course educational design in ways that the array of graduate student and part-time instructors who teach the courses, as well as the students taking the courses, have expressed appreciation for relative to the informal ease of access to, formal accessibility of, and organization of course content, as well as their continuity of experience (helpful theme and variation patterns) within the overall course navigation.  

We worked with the NovEduca team over several months during which our experience of the team leader and all team members was amazing. Specifically, their communication was outstanding—from start to finish they responded to our emails within 24 hours with thoughtfully detailed responses; they also handled meeting scheduling, established meeting agenda, and then compiled and shared detailed notes after each meeting to document what we accomplished and what we still had to do. What felt like a daunting task for us at the outset of the work, became manageable because of how the NovEduca team engaged us with patience, helped us to break-up the work into manageable pieces, and provided positive feedback to us along the way. 

The NovEduca team also listened to very specific concerns we expressed about how the course content (related to past and on-going issues of especially race and racism in the United States) should drive the instructional design, rather than the other way around—in short, NovEduca team members leaned into the idea of “decolonizing” their thinking and, thus, their approach to this instructional design work.  

We held each other mutually accountable by meeting our respective goals, while also being understanding when unexpected personal and/or professional challenges required flexibility. In sum, the NovEduca team was steadfast in working to ensure that the outcome of our collaborative work was reciprocally beneficial and otherwise met or exceeded expectations.”