Vision and leadership can motivate employees to perform well, enjoy their work, and innovate. Yet in the competitive climate of online higher education, managing minimum faculty engagement and performance ensure a consistent student experience. Balancing basic performance management with vision and direction is challenging but possible. In this presentation, participants will learn best practices to lead and manage online faculty and strategies to prevent, target, and troubleshoot faculty performance concerns. Participants will gain fresh insights and tools to build community among remote faculty employees, minimize management demands, provide vision and direction, and maximize faculty performance through coaching.
Presentation Description and Goals (1000 words)
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The session will be presented by faculty directors in three different schools at an entirely online university. Faculty directors coach faculty on teaching excellence and supervise/manage full time and part time faculty who teach entirely online and work remotely.
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In this presentation, we will provide illustrations and examples of stated practices, tools online faculty mangers, department chairs, and directors can immediately use in their own practice, and links to articles and tools used. Participants will be encouraged to bring mobile or other devices in order to participate through the Poll Everwhere software.
Workshop Interaction/Take-aways (100 words)
Workshop participants can expect to come away from the session with new strategies and tools that can immediately be applied to their management of online faculty using a community-building and coaching approach. Powerpoint will be used to illustrate and present major points, Poll Everywhere will be used to gather interactive responses throughout the session, links to an online version of the presentation will be provided, and handouts will be sent home with participants for additional learning opportunities.
Outline of the Presentation:
Why is it important to learn how to prevent, target, and troubleshoot online faculty performance concerns? Online teaching is very different from live teaching. In a live class, things the instructor might say or do are just within that room. Many times, there are no University administrators in the room, and perhaps no one aside from the student observes the class. There is a special dynamic in a live class, and misunderstandings can often be corrected quickly.
In contrast, online, there can be frequent misunderstandings. Interaction is asynchronous like messages posted in the night and seen later. It isn’t really an imitation of live classes. There may be announcements posted each week, and questions answered through e-mail, message tools, or a question discussion thread. The student navigates the materials, readings, lessons, assignments, and other activities, and grading feedback may be provided. The richness that takes place in that online classroom is most often through discussion forums of some kind. Occasionally, there may be an office hour provided, but this is not known to be a heavily attended opportunity.
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Prevent and Troubleshoot Performance Concerns with insights and tools to build community among remote faculty employee
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Prevent and Troubleshoot Performance Concerns by exploring ways to provide vision and directio
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Prevent and Troubleshoot Performance Concerns by maximizing faculty performance through coachin
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Target Performance Concerns by minimizing management demand