Faculty support team representatives describe a collaborative effort to design a self-paced, online faculty training focused on converting a face-to-face lesson online in case of an emergency. We describe the training’s development, demonstrate the training, and engage in a discussion of factors to consider when designing similar training.
In January of 2019, the third polar vortex in five years shut down much of Chicago and resulted in the cancellation of classes for many educational institutions in the city. In addition to extreme weather conditions, instructors may not be able to hold an in-person class due to illness, conference travel, on- or near-campus protests, and building maintenance. Faced with the possibility of more frequent emergency events in the future, our university decided to leverage its burgeoning online learning and faculty support services to help faculty, and ultimately students, continue classes in such situations.
At the behest of university leadership, who sought to update the business continuity and disaster recovery plans to account for the increasing likelihood of inclement weather and other emergency events in the years to come, an ad-hoc team of staff members developed an online, self-paced training. Designed using Articulate 360 Storyline, the training includes one hour’s worth of online content intended to equip instructors with the skills they need to transition a face-to-face activity to the online environment. The training is aimed at helping instructors with little or no prior experience use the university’s learning management system and/or other university-sponsored educational technologies to successfully hold these online class meetings in place of canceled face-to-face sessions. Training topics include how to deliver a lecture in a synchronous or asynchronous format, facilitate a discussion in a synchronous or asynchronous format, organize student content for online delivery, or assign students content to read or watch online.
This session will focus on the collaborative process used to design, develop, and realize an online, self-paced, and interactive training. Staff from three faculty support teams--information technology services, a teaching center, and an online learning office--collaborated to design and develop this training. Situated in different offices across campus, many of these staff members had not collaborated with each other on prior projects. Project meetings took place in person and via Zoom and the team met regularly over several months to put the training together. The presenters will represent each of the faculty support teams involved
After attending the presentation, participants will be able to:
- Describe strategies necessary to implement a self-paced just-in-time training for instructors
- Leverage the expertise across various departments at their university in order to create a self-paced just-in-time training
- Identify how to address potential roadblocks when designing collaboratively across departments
The session will begin with a description of the training’s goals and design and development process as a response to a call from the administration to fulfill university needs regarding disaster recovery initiatives. Next, we will discuss the make-up of the faculty support teams involved in the training – the traditional roles they play at the university, reasons they were selected to collaborate on the project, their various contributions to the project, and the logistics of that collaboration.
The next part of the session will describe steps taken to create and test a working product – the technologies used to create the instruction, the overall learning outcomes, and feedback data from instructor user-testing sessions. We will describe any adjustments made to the training based on their feedback.
Importantly, we will also discuss here the process of making the training accessible and tie this to larger conversations within the university and within the higher education community related to efforts to make trainings, courses, and content more easily used by all populations.
Next, we will enlist the audience in an interactive demonstration of the training, featuring learner-control and dynamic-content aspects of the instruction. Following the demonstration, the presenters will facilitate audience discussion to generate ideas around how other schools could design and facilitate similar trainings. Within this, audience members will receive a concept map. In small groups, audience members will use the concept map to spark discussion about potential roadblocks they might encounter if they planned a similar training or collaboration, what groups would be involved in designing and facilitating the training and why, and how they would establish leadership over the project. Audience members will be encouraged to share their concept maps. The presenters will share “lessons learned” and make recommendations about how to overcome some of the roadblocks.