The focus of this session is to share and discuss the transformation of two university support units into a one-stop comprehensive center for online teaching, course and faculty development support. The session will highlight a working group strategy to identify synergies between the units.
In the United States, online enrollments are increasing year after year. To scale programming, institutions should leverage the capacity of existing support units. One public university met this challenge head-on. Through a prioritization process, the university recognized the need for a comprehensive support model for online program and course development, and teaching. The model needed to increase the university’s capacity to support online programs without sacrificing the support for face-to-face instruction and other faculty-related development needs. The support units, eLearning Services and Faculty Development, were identified as two entities critical to the success of this initiative. At the direction of the Office of the Provost, the two units were merged into a single comprehensive unit. The two functional units had natural synergies that needed to be explored and employed to increase both the efficiency and capacity of the combined unit.
Since the mid-1980’s, part of the mission of the Faculty Development center was to support professional development for faculty creating and teaching distance and online courses through many support and resources channels. At the same time, eLearning Services offered distance and online course development services with a team of instructional and graphic designers, video producers, and programmers. While both organizations shared similar missions related to distance and online course excellence, their approaches and philosophies were different. These different approaches were at times a benefit, providing diverse options for faculty, and other times a detriment, as a source of confusion for faculty and administrators trying to understand their role in online program and course design and development.
In 2015, leaders from Faculty Development and eLearning began to reimagine their cohesive support models for online teaching and online course design at the institution. As part of this process, the leadership team identified priorities and standards for online course design, including adopting a common set of quality standards. In its infant stages, these necessary connections and common ground in mission, talent, and philosophy began to allow this nascent collaboration to take hold and mature. Over the next 3 years, each of these groups implemented processes in parallel, with a shared goal of improving and scaling online courses and programs. In 2018, the two teams were strategically united as a faculty development and instructional design unit, providing a comprehensive support for online courses and programs.
Learn about the twists and turns of the merger in the first year. The presenters will share and discuss the transformation of two independent university units into a one-stop center for online teaching, course, and faculty development. The session will also highlight a group strategy to identify synergies between units. The goals of this session are to share where the center is today and to apply a working group strategy as a model.
During the early transition stage working groups were prioritized as immediate short-term groups, such as quality assurance; and longer range or more ad hoc, such as multi-media production. Membership in each group was determined based on current roles and responsibilities and an equal distribution between each functional unit. The session leader will unpack the transition model used to bring these two units together. In this session, participants will discuss how this might happen at their home institutions.