Goals of this presentation session:
. To demonstrate an effective faculty development practice.
. To collaborate through discussion with other attendees on what effective practices they have used for faculty development.
The presentation will demonstrate a collaborative effort with two University of Michigan campuses to design, develop and use a course web site on the university LMS to teach faculty how to teach online courses. The LMS on the two campuses is CTools, which is a SAKAI based system (open courseware), "flavored" for the UM campuses.
While the design of this faculty development course was a collaborative effort, the course was primarily developed by the UM-Dearborn College of Arts, Sciences and Letters (CASL) online program (CASL Online) director, with the critique of the CASL Online Faculty Advisory Board, and is primarily used on the Dearborn campus by CASL faculty. The course was developed so that it could be taught online with an actual cohort of faculty members or could be used for online self-study by a faculty member alone. The CASL Online team offers the course in the self-study mode in addition to offering workshops through out the year, hosting a Faculty Enrichment Day, offering one-on-one mentoring, and providing technical support. Faculty have appeared not to be interested in a cohort mode learning opportunity.
In the past years, in addition to the CASL faculty, CASL Online has also worked with those using CTools in the School of Education (SOE), who had no other support until 2010 mid-winter term. Last fall, the CASL and SOE deans announced that it would be mandatory for all courses - on-campus, online, and blended - to have a CTools site with a posted syllabus as a bare minimum beginning Fall 2010. The announcement was made with strong encouragement to faculty to begin using CTools during the 2009-2010 academic year to be prepared for Fall 2010.
The mandate and the strong encouragement definitely increased the number of faculty using CTools over the past year and the CASL Online team saw a large increase in requests for training on CTools and technical help. This gave CASL Online the incentive it needed to create a course template that can now be selected on CTools to create a course with the basic student tools very quickly and much more easily. The course design can be altered later and more tools added as needed.
In addition to the deans' encouragement and mandate, faculty development funds were offered to faculty within CASL for teaching online and blended courses. This offer produced proposals for 35 new courses for the 2010-2011 academic year, almost all of which were accepted by mid-winter 2010. This incentive, thus, has increased the number of faculty desiring to learn how to teach online or in blended-mode and how to use the CTools platform and has given CASL Online more opportunities to offer the course to faculty. A survey of those who have used the course has been conducted and the results of that survey will be presented.
CTools will be upgraded to a new release for the 2010-2011 academic year. This release will include a social networking interface, much like Facebook. At that time aspects of using Social Networking will be included in the faculty development course. Last winter semester (2010) we taught workshops on using various social networking applications.
