Getting Started

I spent the past two weeks organizing the articles, websites, handouts, notes, assignments, and other materials I have collected in anticipation of this practicum. It is a bit (a lot) overwhelming to see this mass amount of sources assembled before me and a daunting task to actually begin getting everything into some sort of usable order.

Inspiration

In an effort to provide L-R faculty who are teaching online or will soon be teaching online with appropriate and adequate training, my practicum will focus on the design, development, and a pilot of a fully online training and development course. The name of this training has been in flux so it may be referred to as Introduction to Teaching Online, An Orientation for Faculty Teaching Fully Online, Online Teaching Bootcamp, or some close iteration. The course will be four weeks in length, will be piloted this semester, and then rolled out (hopefully) in Spring 2016.

There is so much I want to cover, but knowing I only have four weeks for this course and knowing how busy our faculty already are, I know I have to pick and choose the most important elements. No biggie, right? I sat myself in front of a giant white board and asked myself what I wanted learners to be able to do or to know upon completion of this training. Ideally I would like for them to describe, recognize, and create interactive learning experiences and best practices related to online instruction and to be able to design, develop, and facilitate a quality online course. Realistically I know I can't accomplish this in a four week window. The overarching goal is to enhance pedagogical and technical skills used in online teaching to produce quality student learning. Therefore, my working draft of course outcomes is this:

Upon successful completion of this course, learners will be able to:

• recognize and identify best practices for online course facilitation and incorporate them into their teaching
• demonstrate basic pedagogical principles of successful online courses through discussion, blogging, and projects
• apply best practices for course design and development
• construct flexible, digital, and interactive learning experiences
• design and implement a plan for continuing education by developing a personal learning network
• assess student work using rubrics
• compare and contrast online teaching and face to face
• collaboratively process and present understandings from readings and reflections
• demonstrate the ability to implement and utilize basic Canvas functions

Over the next two weeks, my plan is to solidify these outcomes so I can work on developing content. I completed a literature review on how faculty teaching online are trained and will revisit it to review their learning outcomes, content, and results.