New Chancellor!, New Directives!, New Challenges!, and New Opportunities for students. Charged with getting an initial thirty courses online and delivered in distance education format yesterday if not sooner! When Chancellor Michael Harris joined Indiana University Kokomo his mantra was IU Kokomo is "On the move". He has a philosophy of connecting the campus with the community and responding to community needs. He is committed to:
-enhancing academic excellence and student success
-engaging in global education
-advancing diversity, and building sustainable community partnerships as a catalyst for economic development and regional pride
IU Kokomo is an urban commuter campus and although courses are offered on campus and in Hybrid (blended format) an initiative for fully online courses did not exist. Chancellor Harris charged the new Director of Distance Education and the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Assessment (CTLA) with the task of developing an initial target of thirty fully online courses. The Executive Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs charged us with keeping IU Quality online.
Goals:
-encourage faculty to rewrite and develop their courses for online delivery
-go from zero to thirty online courses within a year
-maintain the quality of our course offerings
-ensure that there was sufficient support for online courses
The initial aim was to maintain the quality of our course offerings despite the short period of time for development of the first few courses which had to be ready for the Spring 2011 semester. Providing a framework to continue to develop courses to reach our initial target of 30 online courses by Spring 2012 was essential.
Funding was allocated to provide for technology to support the development of online course materials as well as a small stipend to compensate faculty who were developing the courses as well as running the first online version of their course. Several initial information meetings were set up with a sister campus and with key in-house constituents to develop the project outline to support the fully-online initiative. Faculty were invited to participate and give their input on what support they could foresee would be needed to support both themselves and their students in a successful online environment. An open invitation was then sent to faculty inviting them to participate in the Fully-Online initiate. At the meeting expectations were explained and the first six faculty signed contracts to develop courses for the Spring 2011 semester in September 2010.
CTLA investigated and purchased the required hardware and software to support this initiative. Course development laptops were provided to faculty on a loan basis fully loaded with the software and tools for course development. A certificate course was developed for fully-online instructors and initial training sessions began in September.
Regular invitations were sent to faculty inviting them to information sessions on developing fully-online courses and more faculty signed up to develop courses for Summer and Fall 2011, and Spring 2012. Faculty now request these information sessions on how to be included in the fully-online course development initiative.
To ensure quality control all courses that are developed have to be self-assessed according to a rubric provided by CTLA and must be peer-reviewed prior to being presented online to students in order to receive the initial 50% of the stipend allocated for development. The balance of the stipend is received when the course is delivered for the first time. The initial peer-reviews have been conducted by CTLA. We envision that as more faculty move through the development process they will take advantage of the funding provided for further training in peer-review and quality control and that the peer-review process for fully-online delivery will be mostly conducted by faculty.
This session is suitable for any colleges or universities who are interested in developing a distance education program or anyone interested in developing a fully-online course. In this presentation I will step you through the process of how we at IU Kokomo worked as a team to develop a project plan to get faculty, key constituents, quality materials, support, course development tools, software, training, and assessment in place in a very short time frame. I will share the processes and controls we have developed to ensure quality online learning and to assist faculty with their course development. How we collaborated with other Universities and campuses with established distant education practices. What software programs and tools were chosen to enable faculty to quickly develop interactive modules. How faculty participated in a six-week online course to experience the online classroom from a student's perspective and the benefits we gained by building on the experience of others. Participants are invited to ask questions throughout the session and handouts and web links will be available for download.
