Most institutions involved in online learning and teaching are facing the need to develop the knowledge, skills, and attitudes of their faculties in teaching online courses and programs. A variety of institutions are trying many different approaches to how to do that effectively. These programs include many variations in goals, instructional strategies, media and technologies, time frames, incentives, and other variables. Often there is anecdotal evidence of effectiveness from each institution that reports on its efforts, but little systematic investigation of what the key variables are, the effectiveness of the programs, or the relationship between different features and program effectiveness. This presentation compiles a variety of reports of specific faculty development efforts in institutions of higher learning around the country and beyond. The reports were gleaned from online and paper publications and from the proceedings of conferences, such as the annual Sloan-C conference. We compare these models of faculty development in detail on many variables. Naturally, the reports that we have do not all discuss the same elements, so we do not always have information about everything we might desire. Overall, however, we are able to compare many such programs on a range of variables, including the length of the programs, the media and technology used, whether they were face-to-face, blended, or online, the instructional and change management strategies, the instructional and elapsed time of the programs, and the incentives and rewards offered for participation. One issue that has not been well-addressed in reports of various types of faculty development is the question of their effectiveness. The reports may include anecdotal evidence of effectiveness and/or some evidence of positive attitudes toward the developmental activities from the faculty involved in the program. More is needed. A crucial step toward having an effective and professional faculty development will be to examine the effectiveness of our efforts and the relationship of different variables to that effectiveness. We are nowhere near that point now, but the current research is a step toward that goal. The presentation concludes with a research agenda that can be pursued to help guide the evolution of faculty development efforts in the future. That agenda includes the specification of the most important variables that seem to distinguish different programs, the evaluation and measurement of effectiveness, and some methods that might help us answer key questions. Goals: Participants will • Describe key features of faculty development programs for online teaching and learning • Describe how individual programs fit those key features. • Discuss how research into features of faculty development programs can begin to help us understand and improve such program.
