Think globally, act locally

We live in a globalizing world, characterized by a knowledge-based economy. Universities take on a special importance in this economy as they "train the highly skilled workers and contribute to the capacity for innovation that determine competitiveness" (OECD, 2009, p. 13). To sustain this process, they must continuously innovate.

Supporting faculty in pedagogy and instructional design are important components of universities’ innovative efforts, especially since the globalized world’s inescapable feature of competition have forced many to open their doors to new methods of teaching and extend access with online and hybrid learning. Depending on their size and availability of resources, universities support faculty in a myriad of ways. In some institutions, such support is centralized in university level organizations, whereas in others, support is provided in-house by college-level organizations and initiatives. It is tempting to ask which of these organizations are most influential in shaping faculty development and student learning. In this panel presentation, we argue for the need to move beyond the argument of local versus central and look at what happens when these organizations link forces together. Panelists from four institutions will share experiences/examples of leveraging combined efforts to benefit faculty development and instructional design in areas of online, hybrid, and flipped learning. Panelists will address:

1. How a university level organization can leverage college teaching centers to demonstrate best practices, encourage innovation, pilot strategies and technologies on a smaller scale before taking initiatives to a broader audience.

2. How a college level teaching center can leverage the resources available at the university for funding, administrative support, faculty development, multimedia production services.

Each panelist will show how fostering a mutually beneficial relationship between university level instructional design organizations and college level teaching centers and initiatives works at their institution, what challenges and opportunities exist, and provide recommendations and considerations for other institutions.

University of Florida Example:

In 2001, the Warrington College of Business hired their first instructional designer to manage the course design for the online MBA program. Over time, the college added to their efforts to support instructional design and faculty development with a full-fledged Teaching and Learning Center that now employs 3 instructional designers, a graphic designer, a student assistant, an assessment specialist, an accreditation specialist, and a director. The Center supports all fully online courses and programs, conducts teaching observations and provides feedback to new and PhD student instructors to enhance their teaching practices, offers regular pedagogical workshops and panels, and coordinates numerous resources for enhancing teaching and learning within the college. In addition, the Center coordinates closely at the university level, participating in task forces and committees, providing leadership in online initiatives, and its members are heavily involved in the campus wide instructional design community.

University of Nebraska Example:

In fall 2017, the College of Business at the University of Nebraska will open its doors on a new building and a new Teaching and Learning Center. The center will support both student success and faculty development, as well as coordinate with the university level instructional design unit to support online courses and programs. While the vision of the Center is just taking shape, the new director will bring a number of the lessons learned and considerations for success from the University of Florida.

University of South Florida Example:

Innovative Education (InEd) is an academic support unit at the University of South Florida whose goal is to improve access to quality online educational opportunities through courses, certificates and programs at the undergraduate and graduate level. InEd began developing distance learning courses in 2007. In the Spring of 2014, InEd scaled its approach and began supporting a high volume of courses for each college within USF Tampa’s main campus. This new centralized unit of InEd, called Digital Learning, primarily focuses on the development of high-quality online courses and offers services in learning and multimedia design, video production and faculty support. Learning designers partner with faculty to assess student needs and develop effective methods to deliver content online, ensuring that course materials align with student learning outcomes. Digital Learning leaders work closely with the associate deans of each college to identify potential candidates for partnership.

Also in 2014, the USF College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) created a new internal position--Director of Online Academic Initiatives. It is the role of the Director to spearhead CAS’ efforts related to online instruction and to serve as a liaison with InEd. As the largest college in the university, CAS needed a full-time resource in this area, rather than relying upon the associate dean position (as the other colleges were doing) to allocate the college’s available resources with InEd and to lead strategic efforts for expanding online offerings. The Director works to identify areas for online growth with department chairs and prepares selected faculty for their work with InEd by setting and managing expectations related to the nature of the partnership, including outcomes and workload. The college also supplements the InEd development process by providing additional professional development opportunities for its faculty working with InEd.

With the goal of achieving high-quality online courses that facilitate significant learning, the result of this partnership between CAS and InEd has been a better system for supporting faculty through their development of online courses and the ability to generate greater buy-in from the college’s academic units. Further, by partnering with a centralized academic support unit like InEd, efficiencies are achieved by allowing CAS term-by-term flexibility in the degree of its utilization of InEd’s talent and resources as well as providing greater opportunity for the CAS director to address administrative tasks related to online initiatives that would not be as easily achievable if the college managed its own course developments locally.

While working with faculty from CAS, InEd benefits from a dedicated contact to help keep developments on track and ensure that both college goals and university standards for online learning are achieved. Additionally the strengthened college relationship has allowed InEd to pilot new approaches with a limited audience before adopting these practices as their standard operating procedure.

In their presentation, representatives from both InEd and CAS  will discuss opportunities and challenges that come with operating a centralized instructional design unit including the importance of strong relationships with each college, being funded by distance learning fees and revenue-sharing, and the state-wide initiatives that impact internal processes and procedures with the goal of supporting more faculty in the creation of high-quality online courses.

University of Houston Downtown (UHD) Example:

In 2016, the UHD’s Davis College of Business created the Office of Instructional Excellence (OIE) that serves as a resource for the faculty within the College (N=95) in the area of instructional development. The OIE is staffed by: a director with a Ph.D. specialization in online/hybrid learning; a graphic designer that enhance the communication and quality of instructional materials; and a video engineer that helps faculty create video lectures/tutorials for their classes.

Davies College offers the largest MBA program within the Houston area and offers nine BBA degrees. All of the courses in the MBA program use the flipped approach where students’ exposure to new concepts/topics take place online and class time is devoted to active learning. The leveling courses for students who do not have the foundation to start the MBA program are offered fully online. Undergraduate courses offered within the College use all three modalities: online, face-to-face, and hybrid.  

The OIE was given the task of implementing scientific methods to identify improvement aspects for instruction within the College and to develop an improvement process that responds to student needs and provides quality learning. To that end, several initiatives have been established and are underway.

In this presentation, the panelist from the UHD will demonstrate how the OIE leverages the resources within the College to benefit instructional development on a smaller scale before taking initiatives to the university-wide audience. The presentation includes three parts. First, it demonstrates how the OIE uses the College’s mission of “educational excellence” as a positive leverage to its operations. For example, classroom observations, interviews with faculty, and analysis of end-of-course student surveys in MBA classes revealed that the degree to which some faculty understand and execute flipped learning is limited. To help faculty develop an understanding of the flipped approach, a 4-week workshop was initiated. Participants of this workshop learned about flipped learning while experiencing it. The presentation will showcase how this workshop led faculty through the process of intentionally designing a flipped course. Second, the presentation demonstrates how the OIE leverages university’s “applied research” mission to inspire faculty to conduct research on online teaching and learning-related topics that matter to them. Lastly, the presentation will showcase how the director of the OIE leverages her academic background in online teaching to create “buy in” among faculty who perceive online learning as ineffective to traditional learning. The presentation will conclude with challenges faced with these initiatives, opportunities for further improvement, and recommendations for other institutions.

Reference:

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). (2009). Higher education to 2030, volume 2, globalisation, educational research and innovation. Paris: OECD Publishing

Panelists:

Joleen Cannon

Director and Manager, Center for Online Innovation and Production

University of Florida

Tawnya Means, Ph.D.

Director, Teaching & Learning Center

Warrington College of Business, University of Florida

Assistant Dean and Director, Teaching & Learning Center

College of Business, University of Nebraska

Christie Nicholas

Assistant Director Innovative Education

University of South Florida

Sedef Uzuner Smith, Ph.D.

Executive Director of Instruction and Faculty Development

Office of Instructional Excellence, Marilyn Davies College of Business, University of Houston-Downtown

Erin Bryan Sutliff

Director of Online Academic Initiatives

College of Arts and Sciences, University of South Florida