or avoiding chaos in porting in-person classes to virtual course delivery
I would probably be the first person to pontificate on the the value of in-person teaching. After all, human beings are social creatures, fostered by millennia of dependency on the group for survival. Regardless of what our hunter-gatherer ancestors faced in the recesses of time, it is also a fact that humanity has had to constantly adapt to changing circumstances. Adapting face-2-face instruction to online instruction is just one of the more recent adjustments to be made.
The recent crisis in delivery of instruction as a result of the COVID pandemic and school closures highlight the need for adequate preparation of faculty to teach online should the need arise. Moreover, online course delivery is becoming more prevalent as this not only provides convenience to learners but opportunity as many students may not be within traveling distance to an education institution that offers a particular course of study.
The extent and thoroughness of on-boarding faculty varies among education institutions. Well-funded universities and colleges usually have substantial and developed processes for ensuring faculty can teach effectively online. However, many education institutions may not have the funding for full-fledged on-boarding (or had not previously seen a need for it).
In this article, I will outline strategies and preparations I believe would be most effective in training faculty in higher education to be online instructors on short notice. These are strategies that can be implemented as an ad hoc strategy while the scaffolding and more permanent structure is being put in place.
Training supplied by technology vendor
As an instructional designer, I often come across job descriptions that blur the line between an instructional designer and an instructional technologist. I know first hand the expectation to suddenly be very conversant with education technology and everything computers. Not everyone is ‘to the manner born’ when it comes to tech.
A quick solution to the need for training in technology is offerings from technology vendors. For example, both Blackboard and Canvas offer remote courses on the use of their learning management systems.
These training modules can be very brief – maybe a couple of hours or a couple of days. So these would be useful if the need is to quickly get up and running – especially if a full-fledged training plan is not in place.
Blackboard offers useful video on it’s YouTube channel. (Canvas also has a YouTube channel with helpful videos)
Best practices, learning theory
Now we get to the heart of the matter. Teaching. With established instructors who have not previously taught online, you may have varying degrees of receptivity to any guidance. Research has laid well-founded principles of adult learning theory. Some sort of discussion with faculty about learning theory and principles of instructional design (such as Bloom’s taxonomy, and the ADDIE model) if they are designing the online course from scratch, is certainly in order.
But according to insidehighered.com, .. “some of the best training takes place when online instructors come together to discuss challenges and share best practices. Some of these gatherings take place at scheduled workshops, and others informally in department meetings and campus cafeterias.”
In the article An Overview of How Four Institutions Prepare Faculty to Teach Online, Frass, Rucker and Washington (1,) describe how at one education institution, “..shadowing” process, [in which] the senior instructor works with the future instructor on best practices ” is a step in the faculty training process. These studies suggests peer support is useful in faculty acquiring acumen as online instructors.
And so this article’s initial conjecture is revisited. We are in fact social beings and group collaborations and support – sharing knowledge of what works best – is key. This along with online training resources can be a strategy for rapid implementation when needed.
- An Overview of How Four Institutions Prepare Faculty to Teach Online, Frass, Rucker and Washington: Journal of Online Higher Education vol. 1, no. 1/2017