The Circle: A Framework for Online Jesuit Education

The online format provides students with space to collaboratively build and share knowledge. At Seattle University, online and hybrid courses are not designed to be simply electronic repositories for course materials. We see these courses as spaces for learning materials that have been thoughtfully curated and, most importantly, as spaces of inquiry designed around the deep questions of a discipline, questions that challenge students to construct knowledge and meaning in a participatory way.

“The Circle”, as we refer to it, is the representation of what we feel are the most important characteristics for electronically-mediated courses developed through CDLI. It was created not only with IPP principles in mind, but also the best practices for digital delivery and current theory in online course design. The Circle serves dual purposes – it represents our philosophy around course creation for online and hybrid modalities and, in its expanded form, serves as our quality standards by which online courses at the university are evaluated.

See how other SU faculty translated The Circle into practice by viewing it in this accessible format or...

Click on the sections below to see how faculty responded to these questions: