Robust online learning begins with comprehensive faculty development.
A department-based effort to create tools to encourage faculty members to update and innovate their course delivery, assisting them through the process of developing new courses and transitioning existing courses into hybrid and online delivery models. For detailed information, see Transitioning Courses from Face-to-Face to Online and Hybrid Delivery Models [PDF].
This initiative within UO’s Arts and Administration Program is directed at expanding the quality and breadth of courses by incorporating technological tools, creating strong bilateral engagement, building rigorous learning experiences, and supporting excellent teaching. Many universities have developed their own resourced, structured professional development training programs to aid faculty cohorts through the process of developing new courses and revising existing courses within the flipped, hybrid and online delivery models. Such programs usually combine financial, technical, and pedagogical resources to incentivize innovative teaching with technology.
The Online Learning Experience at VCU supports faculty development through a “connected learning” paradigm
Additional Examples
The Academic Learning Transformation Lab at Virginia Commonwealth University offers a five-week “Online Learning Experience” in Summer, Fall, and Spring. The program, one of many faculty learning communities opportunities within a ‘Connected Learning’ paradigm, is a unique online faculty development experience for faculty and staff who have taught or who will be teaching online.
Oregon State University’s eCampus Faculty Training offers three variations of workshops to support faculty teaching online: Developing an Online Course (6 weeks); Actively Engaging Students in An Online Course (3 weeks); and Teaching an Online Course (2 weeks, self-paced). There is also a New Instructor Training offered each quarter.
Also at UO, Academic Extension, CMET, and TEP are developing a faculty training course on high-quality teaching online to launch in Fall 2015 with a cohort of faculty from the Lundquist College of Business. Segments of the course will be co-taught online, modeling best practice, especially around creating engaged, “personable” interaction and sophisticated course activities that insist on students’ higher-order thinking. The faculty cohort will then meet for a series of face-to-face facilitated discussions and course materials workshops to help bolster group members’ capacity to serve as resources for one another and for colleagues who teach online in the future.
