The University of Central Florida is one of the fastest-growing universities in the country, currently ranked as the third-largest public institution in the US with over 53,500 students. This kind of growth has placed enormous pressures on the academic delivery infrastructure, and online learning has proven to be a key strategy to meet student demand. As new faculty are hired to meet that demand, an increasing number of them join UCF with prior experience teaching online elsewhere. This creates a challenge for UCF's Center for Distributed Learning (CDL), which is responsible for the quality of online courses. The centerpiece of faculty development for UCF's online course design and instruction is IDL6543, an eight week, award-winning graduate-level workshop that models how to teach online using a combination of seminars, labs, consultations, and Web-based instruction. IDL6543 is taught in a blended/hybrid format that requires classroom participation. However, IDL6543 is designed for faculty with no online teaching experience and the course has no accommodation for faculty who may be hired on a part-time/adjunct basis to teach only online (and who are not geographically able to participate). For faculty who truly possess existing competence in the design and delivery of online courses, IDL6543 is too comprehensive and perhaps even unnecessary. College deans and department chairs have questioned the need to enroll newly-hired faculty with prior online teaching experience in the required IDL6543 program. However, because there are numerous models for teaching online, including template-based courses for adjunct assignments; original development for full-time faculty; courses that consist only of posted PDF documents; courses taught in wikis, blogs, or Second Life; Quality Matters rubrics; Blackboard Greenhouse rubrics; Sloan-C pillars; WCET guidelines; USDLA guidelines; and many others, there is no clear definition of what "prior online teaching experience" means. UCF prides itself on developing the highest quality online courses (as evidenced by numerous awards) and must ensure that new faculty who are exempted from IDL6543 meet the university's expectations for quality design and delivery of online courses. As a result, UCF is developing an online form intended for selected faculty that will determine if their experience, competence, and teaching philosophy meet CDL standards. It is expected that a final assessment will result in one of several possible results: IDL6543 equivalency, a requirement to complete specific elements from IDL6543 or other programs (including technical instruction on the course management system), a requirement to complete a different professional development program, or a requirement to complete IDL6543 in its entirety. The submitted information and course design/delivery artifacts will be evaluated by instructional designers according to a validated rubric. The online form and rubric will be validated for inter-rater reliability using volunteer faculty and instructional designers according to a rigorous test plan. SESSION GOAL: This session will describe the context, assessment instrument, process, rubric, and validation strategy for evaluating existing online teaching competence.
This session was selected as Best-in-Track for the Faculty Development and Support track.
