Facilitating our online faculty in soaring?
My position at Bay Path University has me deeply involved in researching, synthesizing, training and supporting faculty in the best practices for online course design and delivery. So, I was really focusing in on ideas I could implement as I assist our online faculty to soar with their online courses.
The article entitled, “Three Ways to Breathe New Life into Your Online Courses,” has some very solid advice for implementing Web 2.0 and social media tools into an online course. As I think about the most common issues our online faculty struggle with I wondered “…how to help instructors stay current in resources, tools and lesson planning.” If some of my online faculty still struggle setting up a proper Discussion Assignment within their Canvas course, would they ever be able to handle the appropriate use of these Web 2.0 tools to engage their students?
- How will I ever be able to suggest ‘purposes’ for tools that are: easy to use, have some relevance to the course content and goals, and enhance student learning?
- How can our Online Learning & Digital Team best teach our faculty?
When our Team uses social media- such as Twitter, Google Plus and Linked In for example, as tools to stay connected to our professional peers, how do we ‘teach’ our online faculty to engage in some of these same practices? The article concluded with, this reassuring concept, “By relying on and enhancing instructor creativity, we can breathe new life into our online courses.” This is food for thought and I kept thinking,about this as I continued reviewing our list of shared resources.
The Pelletier article “What Online Teachers Need to Know,” contains timeless advice for online faculty. I believed the most important piece of wisdom was this key idea, “One of the most effective types of training I have found is to enroll in an online course yourself. This will give you the opportunity to experience what it feels like to be the learner, and will no doubt reinforce the importance of presence, communication skills, engaged discussion, constructive feedback.” I can relate [and agree to this suggestion] yet I was still curious.
Having just met some of the Brown University Online Team, at the NERCOMP Conference earlier this November, I wanted to read more about their “Best Practices for Teaching Online.” I liked how the Brown Team organized the basic practices and supported each with their recommendations. The content was solid, however, I did find some bad links and I felt the information could use some refreshing. That said, I did find a nugget of advice [for faculty] in assessing student work online:
“We want tangible evidence of understanding! To achieve this, we expect that you will work with your instructional designer to provide the student access to relevant content (even if it requires online research outside of Canvas) and challenge the student to use the information he or she discovers to generate evidence of that understanding.
For example: well-designed online courses ask students to produce a variety of “learning artifacts” including projects, papers, discussions, photographs, diagrams, illustrations, videos, recorded interviews, and collaborative projects, whether produced independently or in collaboration with other students or subject-matter experts in the field of study. A wealth of artifacts allows you to assess the student’s ability to synthesize course content in great depth, and with confidence and legitimacy.”
All these ideas can be synthesized into the work I do with my online faculty and particularly how to enlighten them as they soar within their own online courses. I also want to be thinking of these ideas as I support my most challenging faculty in searching for that tangible evidence of their understanding in properly using the Canvas Discussion forums and Assignments 😉
