Helping faculty create their own online courses

I had the opportunity to participate in a Faculty Development in Blended and Online Learning Institute (Academic Impressions, Atlanta GA March 5-7, 2008) that allowed me reflection on key aspects of our own faculty professional development strategy, and getting in touch with many other faculty development leaders and online course developers.

In this posting I want to share ideas that emerged contrasting our faculty development and course creation strategy with the Jump Start strategy, from Indiana University - Purdue University at Indianapolis—IUPUI. Anastasia S. Morrone, PhD, Associate Dean of Learning Technologies at IUPUI, shared this strategy. In both cases, the challenge is the same, to support faculty in the development of online and blended learning courses. Both cases demand a full immersion in the process, with consultation and production support.

The first great difference is who sponsors the effort: while at WSSU faculty development and course production is sponsored either by Distance Learning (for online courses) or by the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning—CETL—(for blended courses), at IUPUI, Jump Start participation demands investment from both Learning Technologies and the faculty’s member department or school, they share stipends to be paid to faculty.

Our approach is to help our faculty members redesign their courses growing professionally both in active learning pedagogy and in the use of web 2.0 technologies through the GOAL—Getting Online Active Learning—netcourse. After that, WSSU support faculty in the course creation process, by coaching them both pedagogically (CETL) and technologically (ITG—Information Technologies group); there are benchmarks that help controlling the quality of the process. We have learned that it is not easy to move faculty from conventional to active learning pedagogy, while they appropriate Web 2.0 tools, but it is viable. Time management has become an issue with faculty members that do not have enough support from their academic unit or that have not organized their agenda for effective participation.

At UIPUI there is a team approach for the design and production of online and blended courses: for each course there is a team including an instructional design consultant, an instructional technology consultant, a subject specialist librarian, a media production staff, and a copyright management consultant, in addition to the course author. UIPUI experience is that there is great commitment from the part of academic units to support their faculty when they are co-paying for the process and assuming the production process as an integral part of the academic load of course authors. They have also learned that the team approach is not easy to implement but it is worth following; it demands a change in organizational culture. They have learned that faculty should participate under a voluntary base and with continued departmental support; that faculty selection becomes a critical process, since faculty should understand time commitment, should feel comfortable and open to working as part of a team, and must be committed to developing appropriate documentation for courses being developed.

Let’s reflect on these issues and find out what might work for our case.

Alvaro H Galvis
Director CETL
Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning