Design Team Roles

Tags roles course design responsibilities sponsor course designer content developer

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This page is under construction

Using this pattern

Course design is fundamentally collaborative work that benefits from clear role definition. This pattern defines the key roles in course design and establishes how they interact to create effective learning experiences. By clarifying who does what in the design process, teams can collaborate more efficiently and produce higher quality results.

When developing or adapting courses, teams often struggle with coordination, consistency, and quality control. These challenges intensify as the scale of delivery grows or when working with new team members. Clear role definition helps address these challenges by establishing boundaries, responsibilities, and communication pathways.

This pattern is particularly valuable for:

• HR and L&D teams implementing the course within their organizations

• Delivery teams seeking to understand the design background

• Teams adapting materials for their specific contexts

• Quality assurance and governance processes

• Scaling delivery while maintaining consistency

Design roles

The course design process typically involves three primary roles, though these may be performed by a single person or distributed across a team depending on the project’s scope and complexity.

Sponsor

The Sponsor represents the stakeholder(s) commissioning the course development. They provide strategic direction, resource allocation, and organizational context. More than just a funding source, an effective Sponsor actively engages with the design process to ensure alignment with organizational goals.

In practice, the Sponsor’s responsibilities include:

• Articulating business outcomes and success metrics

• Establishing constraints (budget, timeline, participant numbers)

• Approving major design decisions and approaches

• Providing domain expertise and organizational context

• Ensuring alignment with strategic objectives

Larger organizations often designate a Client role that handles day-to-day coordination while representing the Sponsor’s interests. This Client typically:

• Acts as the primary point of contact for the design team

• Coordinates logistics and scheduling

• Manages participant enrollment and communications

• Provides ongoing feedback and guidance

• Ensures delivery meets organizational requirements

Course Designer

The Course Designer crafts the learning journey, translating organizational needs and learning objectives into a coherent experience. Their work bridges the gap between what participants need to learn and how they’ll best learn it.

Effective Course Designers consider both content and delivery, selecting and sequencing design patterns to create a progressive learning experience. Their key activities include:

• Defining clear learning objectives aligned with organizational needs

• Creating a coherent sequence of activities to build knowledge and skills

• Selecting appropriate patterns and standards for different learning contexts

• Establishing measurable success criteria for the learning experience

• Balancing structure with flexibility to accommodate different groups

• Reviewing and improving course design based on feedback

• Developing templates and patterns to support consistent design

While our courses emphasize experiential learning rather than formal assessment, designers incorporate various ways to check understanding throughout the experience, including reflection activities, application exercises, and peer discussions.

Content Developer

While Course Designers focus on the learning journey, Content Developers bring it to life through tangible materials. They create learning activities, write instructions, develop resources, and ensure consistency across all course components.

The Content Developer role requires both creativity and precision, combining an understanding of learning objectives with practical implementation skills. They serve as the bridge between design concepts and delivery reality, often refining materials based on facilitator feedback.

Their work typically involves:

• Creating course materials and guides

• Developing flightplans

• Crafting effective visual aids for delivery e.g. flipcharts

• Ensuring consistent language and formatting

• Maintaining materials through regular updates

• Validating that content supports learning objectives

• Developing templates and patterns to support consistent delivery

Examples and resources

Teams organize these roles differently depending on their context and needs. In smaller projects, one person might fulfill multiple roles, while larger initiatives might distribute responsibilities across specialized team members.

We have developed the course through rapid prototyping with deep collaboration between roles. The team creates initial versions quickly, then refines based on feedback. This approach adapts well to emerging needs.

We provide various resources on this site to support course design work, available in the Course Materials section. The Course Overview is particularly useful for designers to document learning objectives and design patterns. These materials are shared under a Creative Commons license, giving you a foundation to build upon rather than starting from scratch.

Additional design factors

As teams gain experience with course design, they often discover that role boundaries evolve based on project needs. Initial designs typically require more Sponsor involvement, while established courses shift focus to refinement and adaptation.

When scaling from pilot to full implementation, teams should consider:

• How content adapts to different contexts and languages

• Decision-making authority and escalation paths

• Documentation standards for consistent delivery

• Quality assurance processes across multiple deliveries

• Training needs for expanded delivery teams

In our experience, ambiguous role definition often leads to confusion and delays. Explicitly discussing who has final approval authority and how decisions are made prevents many common frustrations. Particularly important is clarifying responsibility for final sign-off on course materials.

Common challenges we’ve observed include:

• Role boundaries becoming blurred during development

• Handover issues between design and delivery teams

• Balancing stakeholder requirements with participant needs

• Maintaining quality when scaling to multiple deliveries

• Managing course evolution while preserving core elements

As courses mature and reach different audiences, role responsibilities naturally evolve. Content Developers may take on greater autonomy as patterns stabilize, and feedback mechanisms become more formalized. Regardless of how roles are structured, maintaining open communication about responsibilities helps teams adapt to changing needs.

References

Related Patterns:

• Designing Flight Plans

• Delivery Team Roles

• course-materials-pattern

• learning-objectives-pattern

For additional support, please consider asking a question on our Community forum.