An avalanche of students taking online classes fail or drop their classes due to a lack of either student readiness, faculty readiness, or both; yet a solution to this problem is available to all colleges who want to improve their online course success and retention statistics. This solution provides free access for students to an online course that prepares them to take online classes and provides faculty with a certification process to ensure competency in developing and teaching online classes, while mentoring and a course review processes keep online course quality high. See how your college can utilize these tools and earn a readiness certificate yourself by attending this workshop.
Wake Tech fills over 50,000 seats each year in online classrooms. Join us as we examine working success models, online readiness for faculty and students, and assessment strategies that will work for your institution. Analyze and adapt our examples to return to your college as an innovative thought leader!
This workshop will provide success models for increasing student success and retention in online classes and provide details on student readiness strategies, organization and design of online courses, and professional development designed specifically for online faculty. In order for students to be successful in online classes they need time management, organization skills, computer skills, and skills in the learning management system. For faculty to be successful in developing and teaching online courses they need skills in course organization, accessibility, universal design, pedagogy and assessment, computer skills, and detailed knowledge of the learning management system. Online preparedness can be a key requirement before students enter online classes and before faculty develop and/or teach an online class. Mentoring, monitoring, and reviewing all play a supporting role in creating this environment.
During our workshop we will disclose resources you can use at your college to implement student and faculty readiness for online courses. We will provide details of how these resources were developed, used, updated, and showcase proven outcomes that support their success. We will begin our session with an open discussion with the audience to find out what other colleges have implemented and their lessons learned. We will provide the audience with a demonstration of the student modules contained in the student readiness course, a link for them to view and use it, and a handout for them to take home showing the success metrics.
Wake Tech has used both student readiness and faculty readiness as the two main tiers supporting online success. We will discuss our faculty preparedness methodology in detail and provide the audience with details of how they can become certified for online teaching according to these standards. A handout with the knowledge, skills, and abilities taught in the online certification will be provided, along with a link to access more information. We will also discuss how our mentoring program and course review process was created to maintain these online course standards.
We will conclude our session with a Think-Pair-Share exercise for the audience members to discuss what methods they have created to assess their online courses and if none exists, what components should be included in an online assessment. Each pair will have seven minutes to exchange ideas and then they will report out to the audience. We will document their responses, allowing them to take photos of the results and providing a written report after the event. For each participant we will encourage them to document which components would be vital to success at their particular institution and to discuss openly with the audience how they might implement these components at their institutions.
The primary audience for this workshop will be faculty who teach online courses or who are preparing to teach online courses, deans and department heads who desire to increase their online student success and retention, and administrators who think online courses can be improved at their institution. This audience would benefit by knowing how to access and make the student readiness module available at their college, and how to ensure their faculty are certified to teach online. Those participants that complete this workshop will receive an “EPIC readiness” certificate after the event, demonstrating their knowledge of student and faculty readiness for online teaching and learning.