The Teaching Online Pedagogical Repository: An Open Faculty Development Resource

The University of Central Florida (UCF) is a metropolitan research-based state university, located in Orlando, Florida. With a student enrollment of 56,235, UCF became the second-largest university in the nation in fall 2010. To meet students' needs, UCF placed online learning as one of the most important institutional goals, offering 4 undergraduate, 21 graduate, 25 graduate certificate programs fully online. In the academic year 2010-2011, 30.4% of course credit hours at UCF were delivered through an online modality. While long a leader in faculty development for online teaching, UCF continues to create offerings that help faculty at UCF and beyond more effectively teach online. One such initiative, the Teaching Online Pedagogical Repository (TOPR), is a public resource for online faculty and instructional designers seeking inspiration from online teaching strategies that have proven successful for others. All too often, due to the virtual closed classroom doors of our course management systems, even veteran online faculty are unaware of what practices their colleagues are employing in their teaching. TOPR helps to address this problem by providing a venue through which faculty can present concrete examples of their work. Each TOPR entry describes a strategy drawn from the pedagogical practice of online teaching faculty, depicts this strategy with artifacts from actual courses, and is aligned with findings from research or professional practice literature. Emphasis is placed upon practices which are impactful and replicable. TOPR entries are tagged with relevant keywords to aid discovery of relevant content. Additionally, site visitors may also find entries by searching or by browsing a topical index. While TOPR is currently in its beta release, all are welcome to access its content and propose new entries. In its full release, TOPR entries employ a formal submission process including review by an editorial board. All content in TOPR (including supporting artifacts and media) is licensed under a Creative Commons License. The current version of the Teaching Online Pedagogical Repository is available at: http://topr.online.ucf.edu/ . In this session, the presenters will demonstrate how easily one may access TOPR. In addition, they will summarize the conceptual framework underlying TOPR and outline the development process followed. Participants will be encouraged to identify applications for TOPR in their own settings and to engage with the community supporting TOPR.