Internet Learning Volume 4, Number 2, Fall 2015 | Page 116

Advanced Faculty Professional Development for Online Course Building: An Action Research Project
and selected those most appropriate for
advanced faculty development. Two online
coordinators, the instructional designer,
and the director of CHSS ODE then created
software and pedagogy modules to increase
the number of modules for advanced
faculty development to 15. The program’s
final modules included:
(a) Softchalk,
(b) Best Practices in Mobile Learning,
(c) The Latest Research on Successful
Online Learning,
(d) Strong and Effective Types of Feedback,
(e) Panopto,
(f) Get Your Students’ Heads INTO the
clouds: Cloud computing,
(g) Creative Assignments in the Online
Classroom: The Virtual Museum,
(h) VoiceThread,
(i) “Faculty Presence” in Online Courses,
(j) Doceri: An iPad App for Creating
Content “On the Go”,
(k) Tiki Toki,
(l) Learner-Content Interaction in Online
Courses,
(m) The Use of Social Media in Online
Teaching,
(n) Work Smarter, Not Harder, and
(o) Wiki is Hawaiian for Fast!
With the modules set, faculty
members were offered a chance to participate
in the advanced faculty development
program entitled “Skills Update Workshop”.
To promote the development of additional
online courses, successful completion
of this new training and the subsequent
delivery of a new online course resulted
in the awarding of a $1000 stipend to the
faculty member, an amount consistent with
the average recommendation of the online
coordinators who completed the survey.
As Figure 7 indicates, the “Skills
Update Workshop” resulted in the creation
of 25 new online courses since the program
was first offered in fall 2012. The increases
in online course offerings are presented
based on departments in HSS.
While all HSS departments have not
developed new online courses at the same
rate, most departments have increased their
online course offerings each successive year
since 2012. Above all, ODE is now well
positioned to meet its goal for additional
online course offerings based on its faculty
training programs refined through this and
related research.
Summary
The benefits of faculty development
for enhancing teaching effectiveness
have been well documented
(Emerson & Mosteller, 2000; Gillespie &
Robertson, 2010); nevertheless, motivating
faculty to pursue advanced faculty
development opportunities presents a
unique challenge in light of the increasing
expectations and competing priorities.
Given this challenge, the “The Project” was
developed at Kennesaw State University to
train faculty in online course development
and delivery. Based on this and concurrent
research examining “The Project”
(Terantino, Slinger-Friedman, Thomas,
Randall, Aust, & Powell, 2014; Slinger-
Friedman, Terantino, Randall, Aust, &
Powell, 2014), the resulting “Skills Update
Workshop” has gone far in providing faculty
members advanced technology training for
online instruction at Kennesaw State.
The success of any faculty training
program hinges on creating a program that
effectively delivers appropriate content in a
supportive environment. The findings of this
research offer a roadmap for improving the
content and structure of online instruction
in new and existing online courses. In sum,
this research describes one solution to
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