In an era where faculty are coming to the institution with some online teaching experience, how does one train faculty in the art of teaching online? Come explore the technique that St. Edward’s University employed in their professional development. It’s short, to the point, and even a little fun!
In Inside Higher Ed’s “Teaching Teachers to Teach Online” administrators noted that the way we deliver professional development has changed greatly to include many types of professional development offerings (Dimeo, 2017). A lot of these techniques have resulted from the understanding that faculty have a general lack of time. With that understanding, our institution, too, was challenged with creating professional development that faculty could attend, complete, and more or less retain the information they needed. The intent is that faculty would utilize best practice while employing the institution’s brand of online education delivery.
This session explores what can be accomplished in a fully-online professional development course with short targeted learning modules with multiple interactives. Modules cover 5 best practice online teaching topics with an institutional and program policy module. These topics ranged from communication policies, teaching presence, group work facilitation to delivering synchronous online sessions and providing feedback and grading. Although there is an overwhelming amount of research and learning material in each topic, the solution, here, was to limit each topic to 3-5 essential tips per individual topic.
To help reinforce faculty learning, the course utilizes knowledge checks. These are short interactives that includes matching, drag and drop, scenario-based problem-solving, and a multiple-choice type quiz. These checks use H5P, http://h5p.org, a free tool that can help faculty incorporate interactivity into their course design. These interactives are then easily embedded into the content of our institution’s learning management system (LMS). There are also two additional required items faculty must complete. First, faculty must sign an agreement to adhere to their program guidelines. The second is a simulation assignment where faculty use our campus’ video conference tool, record themselves, display a PowerPoint presentation through the recording and finally, provide a URL to the recording.
After taking the course, faculty meet with their instructional designer for a one-hour meeting. This meeting covers any outstanding questions faculty have using the learning management system and delivering our synchronous video conference sessions. Because faculty may already have this training, we can keep this engagement targeted to a faculty member’s need. Additionally, this consultation covers course-related specifics using the “Notes to Help You Facilitate This Course” developed by the subject-matter expert and assigned instructional designer. This helps complete just-in-time training for the faculty.
Faculty have already begun completing this professional development course and report a less than 2-hour completion time. Because of this, faculty have expressed appreciation for having their time respected. Additionally, there has been some favorable comments regarding the H5P interactives where faculty described the experience as “fun.” And as the course enrolls more faculty on an on-going basis, there will be more data to share with the attendees.
To interact with the attendees a line of questioning has been developed, one we used to help guide us to determining what type of professional development we delivered. These questions ask:
- Have we offered professional development to help our faculty with teaching online?
- If so, what were the successes and challenges of the offering?
- If we were going to develop a new offering what would it look like?
- What category of topics would we like to cover?
- By the end of the delivery, what would we like our faculty to demonstrate learning of?
Although these questions are not ground-breaking, they help highlight what the most essential topics were and in so doing help kept the course succinct. During the presentation, attendees will work through these questions and collaborate online in real time through using various technologies like online collaboration tools and polling software. Attendees will also explore how a course such like this can be improved without creating the usual course bloat that comes from a redesign.
Finally, the key takeaways from this presentation is a process that will help other institutions formulate a professional development plan that will work for their ecosystem. Furthermore, attendees will learn about another tool that can help online faculty and professional development trainers alike with enhancing their own content at no extra cost. These techniques will help take any professional development from drab to fab!