UTEP’s Center for Instructional Design (CID) invites you to explore our Teaching Online Academy, a four week course for faculty designed to provide enrollees with effective techniques for creating and maintaining fully online courses in higher education.
The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) and the Center for Instructional Design (CID) require that all current and future online instructors become certified in online instruction. This certification course allows instructors to earn 25 hours of online participation, and is designed to emulate the design and pace of a 100% online course.The Teaching Online Academy (TOA) is an innovative course created for faculty to learn methodologies and build networking relationships with other faculty and university staff. The TOA focuses on effective communication and interaction with students, online classroom management, assessment, and course mapping and design. Throughout the Academy, the facilitators explore course quality guidelines for course development, and preview a course technical review that is part of CID’s course development process. Instructors new to online learning will gain true hands-on experience, and those with previous experience are exposed to instructional design best practices and emerging technology trends.
The CID offers the TOA as 100% online course, that runs three times per academic year: fall, spring, and summer. This is a month long course designed using a modular format and consisting of an introduction to the course and four instructional modules. The course is not self-paced, but rather designed with weekly deadlines and a final exam. Student engagement and instructor presence are at the forefront of CID’s online development process. This equates to three basic components of teaching presence: 1) to design the course so that is is “personally meaningful and educationally worthwhile,” 2) “the instructor function[s] as a facilitator” of knowledge, and 3) the instructor maintains the role of a “subject matter expert” (Jones, 2011, p.79). These components translate into best practices and design methods that help faculty dispel the myth that teaching online is easier than teaching face-to face (F2F) and assist with motivating students extrinsically (Everson, 2009).
Module 1 illustrates the major differences between F2F and online instruction, focusing on flipped classrooms, student-centered learning, and course mapping in relation to objectives and outcomes. This instruction takes place in the form of lectures, videos, blog posts and replies between faculty and TOA facilitators. The module concludes with participants submitting a course map they created for the first week of their online course.
In Module 2, faculty members continue to interact closely with the facilitators while discussing strategies to establish good rapport with students and methods to increase instructor presence. This section highlights the importance of weaving personal experience into one’s course, which promotes social interaction and real-world experiences rather than relying only on text-based and asynchronous activities (Boling, C E; Hough, M; Krinsky, H; Saleem, H; Stevens, M, 2012).
Module 3 consists of activities on U.S. Copyright law and the Americans with Disability Act (ADA) and the importance of adhering to these laws. This module explores many scenarios involving digital material and provides multiple options for what an instructor can and cannot share with students in an online environment. The module also includes several discussions that address the Fair Use Act of 2007. This provision is intended to give educators some ‘breathing room’ when it comes to sharing other's’ work, which is defined in detail in this section of the course (U. S. Copyright Office, 2016). The later portion of the module addresses ADA compliance and provides faculty with best practices on equal accessibility for all students. These necessary practices include captioning for all videos, alternative text for all images, and sufficient color contrast for students in need of an accommodation.
Module 4, the final module, requires instructors to create a syllabus and calendar, while applying all the strategies and skills learned throughout the course. This module requires more than just building a traditional syllabus in Microsoft Word. This exercise in the TOA seeks to shift the mentality of an instructor into thinking “online” and developing such documents in a way that will be accessible, clear, and informative to students. Online courses do not allow for verbal clarification like F2F or hybrid courses do and course resources must be entirely focused on a 100% online audience. This module concludes with best practices for building an effective online syllabus and calendar including accessible office hours, technology requirements, technology support, attendance and online participation, and statements about academic dishonesty and accommodations.
The purpose of this proposed session is to share several ‘best practices’ in online learning for faculty via a certification course. Attendees will find that the TOA is geared toward exposing instructors to online pedagogy, not necessarily mastering all the content at once. The TOA is also used as a forum to communicate related online resources like the University help desk, tutoring centers, related peer reviewed articles, and social media sites. Each attendee will receive a concise handout mapping the fundamentals of UTEP’s TOA, and an invitation to participate in a future TOA course. The proposed session will close with a Q/A session with suggested prompts to facilitate conversation.
References
Boling, C. E.; Hough, M.; Krinsky, H.; Saleem, H.; Stevens, M. (2012). Cutting the distance in
distance education: Perspectives on what promotes positive, online learning
experiences, The Internet and Higher Education, 118-126.
Everson, M. (2009). 10 Things I’ve Learned About Teaching Online, ELearning
Magazine. Retrieved from http://elearnmag.acm.org/featured.cfm?aid=1609990.
Jones, I. M. (2011). Can You See Me Now? Defining Teacher Presence in the Online
Classroom Through Through Building a Learning Community, Journal of Legal Studies
Communication, 79.
U.S. Copyright Office. (n.d.). Copyright in General (FAQ). Retrieved October 09, 2016 from
http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html.
U.S. Copyright Office (n.d.). More Information on Fair Use. Retrieved October 10, 2016 from