Kansas State University is in its 5th year of a faculty development course that educates faculty how to teach online. Assessment results and changes, technology tools utilized, efforts in ensuring ADA compliant content on a budget and differences in training on the two different sized campuses will be discussed.
Kansas State University is on its 5th year of a seven-week course, K-State Online Essentials, that educates faculty how to teach online. This course started at the smaller Polytechnic campus, a community with 700 FTE and was soon adopted by the larger K-State Manhattan Campus, a campus with 20,000 FTE. This presentation will share the differences between running this type of faculty professional development at two very different campuses. We will also explore assessment that has been done, changes that have been made and lessons learned since the implementation of this course.
The seven-week course consists of one week of face-to-face sessions that allows for hands-on technology time, discussion on how the course will run, introduction to tools and services that are available to them, and any questions and concerns of the participants. This time together also allows for a community of learning to begin to form. They find that their colleagues have the same concerns and fears that they possess and often they continue to work together and share their issues and successes on and offline. While some argue that professional development teaching individuals how to teach online requiring a face-to-face component is counterproductive, we have had a zero percent completion rate of faculty taking the course completely online. The completion rate is 91% when the face-to-face portion is included.
There are many differences between the two campuses on which the course is taught. These include focus of degree programs as well as attitude towards online courses. The biggest difference between the two, in regard to the course, is the fact that the smaller campus requires faculty to take the course before teaching online. These participants are paid a stipend for their time. On the larger campus, participants must apply and be accepted to take the course. Their participation in the course is voluntary with no compensation.
According to participant survey results, the course is meeting its goal of increasing faculty’s confidence to teach online and increasing their desire to organize and create a quality online course. The surveys also show weaknesses. These weaknesses are addressed with changes being made in hopes of increasing the satisfaction of participating faculty.
One major change that has recently been made to the course is the increase in information and hands-on training to make course content more accessible. As institutions begin to face law suits and pay large sums of money due to content not being ADA compliant, educating faculty creating online courses becomes crucial. The always shrinking budgets of institutions of higher education requires us to find creative and cheap ways to meet these requirements which is taught to participants. This course teaches faculty how to create ADA compliant videos and documents.
Participants will be shown many aspects of the course, such strengths and weaknesses, assessment results and changes, technology tools utilized, efforts in ensuring ADA compliant content on a budget and differences between the training on the two campuses. Participants will also be encouraged to share their experiences and thoughts on the topics being discussed. Time will be left for an audience question and answer session.