Presenters
Alison Consol, Wake Technical Community CollegeJessica Hatcher, Wake Technical Community CollegeCindy Foster, Wake Technical Community College
Session Abstract
This session focuses on advanced professional development for online instructors. As part of Wake Tech’s QEP project, a certification program was developed and deployed to train faculty to become Master Online Instructors. The objective is to develop eLearning experts and leaders within the college to raise the quality of online courses and ultimately, student success rates. We will discuss the development, deployment, and effects of this program. The session is interactive, with Q&A.
My Notes/Thoughts
- Successful online courses includes student and faculty preparedness
- Best practices in online design and delivery
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- Navigation
- Communication
- Collaboration
- Assessment
- Participatory, team-based development by faculty and eLearning staff
- Based on research into best practices
Options for online teaching certification can consist of either
- 30 hours of professional development
- Having your course peer reviewed
- Mentorship
When looking at the 30-hours of professional development, the courses include LMS training, accessibility, UDL, and then the core components of a course (communication/collaboration, navigating, assessments, etc.) and then the PD concludes with a capstone. The capstone consists of having a partially completed online course.I definitely like this approach, no surprise there (I’m sure), because it creates levels of consistency across all of the online courses. This also allows faculty to keep their academic freedom – much like programs similar to QM.One of the tools that they recommended for creating videos is TelePrompTer, an app that allows you to read from a teleprompter while recording yourself. It’s a useful tool because faculty have to create a transcript for the video anyway, so why not read from the transcript when doing the recording?! I’ve used (and still use) this tool for larger scale videos and it’s a great tool.Overall, it was good session. I enjoyed hearing about the different ways that faculty can get “certified” to teach online. In my role, the Instructional Designers are the only ones who really teach classes, but I can definitely tell that implementing these techniques in higher ed can reap strong benefits for faculty (and students).
Matthew Evins 