Category: Ask ADDIE

Author and Editor: Dr. Kelvin Thompson

Dear ADDIE:

Perhaps you can help us. My colleagues and I are noticing a pattern. In some cases, the instructors who created online courses are no longer the ones teaching them. I’ve personally spoken with a student who complained about the bad experience she was having in an online course that I know was designed well. I was surprised to learn that the person teaching it was not the person who designed it. (As far as I can tell, the course itself hasn’t changed substantively.) Also, we’ve received inquiries from faculty who have been assigned to teach online using someone else’s materials. As one of these instructors said: “I’m not sure what or how much I can change, and this is my first time teaching online, so I don’t really know what the best practices are.”

What can we do to help these faculty be successful?

Sincerely,
Perplexed by Patterns of the Poorly Prepared

Dear Perplexed:

Yes, this is a challenge that we see happening with increasing frequency across a wide range of institutions. While some colleges/departments understand that preparing faculty to teach online is important for faculty “inheriting” an existing online course, others see no reason to prepare them since the online courses are already developed and are, presumably, “good.” In our experience, to further complicate matters, most of the instructors of record of these “handed off” courses are adjunct faculty (or graduate students at the university level).

It is worth noting that the popular approach at some institutions of designing “master courses” (also called template courses or standardized courses) which are then handed off to adjunct faculty to teach does not completely address the problem you’ve raised. In such cases, while the course itself is solid in design, and the instructor is presumably skilled and knowledgeable, it is the combination of course and new-to-the-course instructor that is the potential problem. It seems to us somewhat like driving a friend’s car. There is nothing wrong with the car or the new driver. However, the car is customized for the old driver, and the new driver will need to 1) acquaint herself (e.g., look over the instrument panel and equipment) and 2) possibly make some adjustments (e.g., adjust seats, mirror, and sound system) in order to drive safely and comfortably.

Any faculty preparation that you do (and we would suggest that you do offer some preparation for these faculty) should focus on 1) understanding the design of the course, 2) being clear about what kinds of adjustments are within his scope, and 3) being equipped to carry out the course as designed/adjusted (e.g., LMS skills and facilitation tips).

Depending upon the culture of your institution and the types of faculty development that are accepted, the ways in which you address the above needs might vary. However, we dare say that, especially for adjunct faculty, the fact that you are offering any preparation at all may be perceived as a motivating incentive. Building upon this idea, if indeed adjunct faculty are the primary group “inheriting” online courses, please be mindful to time your offerings accordingly. That is, such instructors often do not receive course assignments until very close to the start of the term, and they may only be available to participate in offerings scheduled after hours, on the weekend, or in a self-paced manner online. Some possible venues for preparing faculty “inheriting” existing online courses, in increasing level of complexity, include:

• Job aids/tip sheets written with inheriting faculty in mind
• Open labs (multiple times) with personnel on-hand to provide “at-your-shoulder” assistance
• A workshop in which participants are guided through the processes of course familiarization and modification
• An actual “course” designed for “inheriting” faculty (Note: See a description of one such course: UCF’s ADL5000.)

One final strategy that some have found helpful as part of the course hand-off process, is encouraging the creation of “designer notes” that remain a part of the course (e.g., within the LMS file management area). Such notes may provide “message-in-a-bottle” type guidance from the original course designer to any and all subsequent inheritors. However, a modified approach might also include a brief note from each iterative instructor noting what modifications were made, what facilitation strategies were effective, etc.

We hope these suggestions are useful to all who need to prepare faculty to be successful in teaching online courses they did not design. However, you might have additional ideas or alternative suggestions. Please share your thoughts with our TOPkit community on LinkedIn! We would love to see them!

Until next month,

Author and Editor: Dr. Kelvin Thompson

Dear ADDIE:

As instructional designers we are sometimes frustrated to see our faculty use publisher materials as the basis for their online courses. While it is possible to integrate these kinds of materials meaningfully, that is often not what we see happening. It is so tempting for instructors to simply add a link to a publisher’s website and be done with it. Online students can become confused or lost since they must leave their course for an external website. Once they are away from the course browsing around the internet, you can lose them forever! Additionally, instructors can become frustrated because their grades may now appear on the publisher’s website rather than in their own online course gradebook. Copying grades back into the course website is twice the work! (Sometimes it is more work for us as instructional designers too, because we end up helping with the copying!)

We don’t encourage relying on publisher materials in our faculty training, and we can’t stop faculty from making these decisions after the training.

What can we do?

Signed,

Pondering Publisher-Provided Problems

Dear Pondering:

As you’ve suggested, publisher-provided materials are not the problem per se. You’ve rightly expressed concern for what, in our opinion, is the central issue: the quality of the online student learning experience. Any number of factors may impact this student experience positively or negatively. If we had to boil down to one idea the single biggest contributor to positive student experience, though, we would say “intentional design.”

Deliberate, thoughtful decisions about learning outcomes, content selection, student learning activities/assignments, assessments of learning, interaction opportunities, and practical usability are likely the best way to bring about consistently positive student experiences that result in student learning. This is true of individual online courses and entire programs offered by institutions.

Some faculty, expert in their subject areas but not equipped for the systematic design of instruction, may be tempted to assemble courses from components ready at-hand with the least amount of time investment necessary. One can hardly fault faculty for wanting to be time efficient given the myriad demands competing for their attention! However, a “quickest route” mindset rarely results in design decisions yielding the best outcomes for students.

As you’ve noted, faculty preparation for teaching online (i.e., faculty development/training) is the starting point for this kind of intentional design by online instructors. However, nurturing intentional design as an on-going, iterative process may be the best long-term strategy. That is, course design is not a one-time, set-it-and-forget-it kind of thing. Common methods for facilitating this kind of iterative decision-making, depending upon your particular institutional context may include: faculty learning communities, peer mentors, or consultations with an instructional designer.

One sometimes overlooked resource useful in each of these approaches is the course quality rubric. As the Open SUNY Center for Online Teaching Excellence (COTE) has noted regarding their open-licensed rubric (OSCQR):

The rubric can be used formatively with… online faculty to help guide, inform and influence the design of their new [or mature] online courses. It is non-evaluative: Conceptually the rubric and process approach course review and refresh as a professional development exercise, to guide faculty in their understanding of improving course design from an effective practices perspective, rather than as a course evaluation, or quality assurance procedure. It prioritizes changes. (Read more.)

If your institution has not already adopted a course quality rubric, the TOPkit “Checklists & Rubrics” section provides a collection of annotated links to many online course standards, rubrics, and checklists drawn from a variety of contexts. Such resources can be helpful indeed if approached as guides in the iterative course design process.

It is our hope that placing a systemic emphasis on intentional design will negate the ill effects of over-reliance on publisher-provided materials and other less mindful decisions.

What thoughts do others have? Please share your thoughts with our TOPkit community on LinkedIn!

Until next month,

Author and Editor: Dr. Kelvin Thompson

Dear ADDIE:

My faculty clients are struggling with meaningfully engaging their students online. Some question the value of online discussions entirely while others recognize the value of student engagement but seem ill-equipped to achieve it. As an example, please consider the following excerpt from a message I received this week from one of my faculty:

As you know, I have been teaching Economics here for a few years now both on-ground and online. In my face-to-face courses, I can usually generate a good amount of discussion around the subject and see how engaged they are and feed off their responses. However, when I teach this same course online, the discussions are anything but stimulating or engaging; even though i’m using the same discussion questions. The students limit themselves to a quick sentence or two and don’t seem interested in replying to each other. What can I do to motivate my students and get them excited about Economics?

What can you offer to help me help this faculty colleague and the many more like her?

Signed,

Engaged in Helping Faculty Engage More

Dear Engaged:

Yes, the ubiquity of the asynchronous discussion seems to be both a blessing and a curse. While it is wonderful that so many courses allow easy access to this communication venue, perhaps its general presence belies the challenges inherent in skillfully using this engagement tool. The good news, of course, is that there are many research-based and professional practice  resources for faculty and designers wishing to make online discussions better (e.g., via well-constructed prompts, scoring rubrics, interaction protocols, etc.). [Readers: You might wish to review the numerous entries related to online discussions in the Teaching Online Pedagogical Repository.] The bad news is, as you know, it is difficult to simply disseminate these findings to faculty and expect the situation to improve. It has been our observation that some things have to be experienced in order to be truly understood and internalized.

Depending upon your existing faculty development offerings for your faculty who teach online, you might find it helpful to provide personal, hands-on experiences with the kind of rich, engaging online discussions that the literature suggests is possible. This is perhaps best realized in an actual online course experience spanning multiple weeks so that faculty-as-participants can experience both the mechanics and the timeframe involved in effective online discussions.In speaking with faculty colleagues, we have found that even among those who participated in online discussions in graduate school, many had poor experiences with such discussions. Having a positive experience with well-facilitated discussion can go a long way toward faculty facilitating such discussions themselves. Of course, it is very helpful to also debrief with such faculty, helping them recognize the various elements that contributed to their positive experience. At that point, sharing various support resources (e.g., rubric examples, prompt-construction strategies, etc.) are often well-received as the faculty are ready to apply such ideas in their own teaching. Of course, an in-depth faculty consultation with an instructional designer is always recommended to design the very best online discussion activities.

If it is not feasible for faculty to engage in such a realistic multi-week online course experience, the online discussion experience may be simulated to some extent in a real-time workshop. Using a compressed timeframe, facilitators can walk participants through the elements of a well-constructed and well-facilitated online discussion while participants go through the student steps of posting and reading during the session. We have even seen such sessions spark enough interest that faculty participants choose to stay engaged on their own time (asynchronously) after the workshop concludes. If your faculty respond best to just-in-time resources, a much less effective, but still illustrative approach is to modify the workshop presentation to a screencast-style tutorial in which the design and facilitation elements of an online discussion are presented and sample student postings are demonstrated in a hyper-compressed time frame (e.g., 5 minutes).

Space does not permit us to elaborate on additional, nuanced strategies such as debates, case studies, or integrating media elements within online discussions. Nor do we have time to explore alternative online student engagement strategies beyond the asynchronous discussion, but these might include well-designed activities using tools such as public blogs, VoiceThread, etc. Perhaps we can look into these in another column if there is sufficient interest.

Meanwhile, we hope that the above ideas have stimulated your thinking about how to best help your faculty to achieve a new level of successful online engagement with your students.

What additional ideas do others in our community have? Do you have differing thoughts? Supporting personal stories? Please share your thoughts with our TOPkit community on LinkedIn!

Until next month,

Author and Editor: Dr. Kelvin Thompson

Dear ADDIE:
We have quite the quandary here.  Just as at most institutions, use of the learning management system has become integral to our delivery of instruction, regardless of modality.  This means that all faculty must be trained in using the tools provided in the LMS regardless of when they are hired.  For planned hires, this is part of our standard on-boarding process for full-time and adjunct faculty.  The problems arise when new faculty are hired at the last minute.  We all want the problem of needing to add course sections, which drives the need for additional faculty, but entrusting untrained faculty with keys to the LMS can provide a negative student experience.

We have implemented several remedies to address the problem but each comes with its own set of issues:

1. Our staff use a “drop everything and train” approach:  This is very effective with faculty who have a higher aptitude, but novice users and beginning faculty usually are already overwhelmed with all of the other institutional requirements to learn the LMS a few days before their course starts.  They also have little opportunity for reinforcement.  Faculty living out of area are also not helped by this model.
2. We provide online resources:  These are designed as a reinforcement and are helpful to out of area faculty but we generally find that a faculty member who needs extra help delivering content online also needs help consuming content online.  
3. We provide “almost-in-time” support:  Whereas just-in-time supply has the needed resource there when it is needed, we often find ourselves being asked a question after the faculty member needed the skill.  We are given the opportunity to provide training after grades have been improperly entered, test results have been deleted or last year’s syllabus [inadvertently] published.  None of these things aid in student learning or promote student confidence in the faculty member, the technology or the institution.  

Do you have any suggestions for us to modify our last-minute faculty development to better prepare late hires to wield the tools of technology?

Signed,

Flabbergasted By Last-Minute Faculty

 

Dear Flabbergasted:

We feel your pain! Yes, it is a great thing to add course sections to better serve students, but doing so through eleventh-hour adjunct contracts is fraught with logistical challenges. Kudos to you for keeping the student learning experience at the forefront of your concerns!

You asked specifically about LMS training for these last-minute faculty hires, but we would be remiss if we didn’t take a moment to comment on the relationship between LMS training and faculty preparation for teaching online. While all online faculty using a learning management system must certainly be skillful in using these tools, there is so much more to online teaching than mere LMS use as we are sure you know. At a minimum, an effective online faculty development program should address course/instructional design, online teaching practices/pedagogy, and institution-specific logistical protocols in addition to technology skills (including, but not limited to, LMS use). Of course, how such online faculty preparation is carried out will be influenced to a great degree by one’s institutional context. [Readers: You might wish to take a look at the Faculty Development Models section of TOPkit for much more on this topic.]

While you might find them wanting, your existing approaches for addressing the LMS needs of late-hired faculty are commendable and certainly understandable. Following are a few additional ideas to consider. However, as with the online faculty development models mentioned above, the feasibility of these LMS training options will be influenced by any number of institutional factors, especially resources.

Pre-Prepare
Many academic programs try to cultivate a relationship with experts who can serve as adjuncts with short notice. If this is the case at your institution, you might work with your academic points-of-contact to pre-prepare such on-again/off-again adjuncts for using the LMS. This would ensure that these adjunct faculty are already ready to go once they are needed and get a contract. One issue here is how you conduct your LMS training. That is, are your LMS trainings (whether online or face-to-face) restricted to current employees of your institution?

Grant “Credit”
Depending upon the LMS adopted by your institution, there might be a third-party “certification” for faculty use of the LMS. If so, you might choose to recognize (i.e., give credit for) this certification at your institution. This could be of particular value if the sponsoring organization is already known within your institution’s community of potential adjuncts. (As you know, many adjuncts teach for multiple institutions.)

Make Just-in-Time
Building upon your “almost just-in-time” experiences, perhaps you might create a semesterly calendar of LMS milestones and send out a message to all LMS-using faculty prior to the expected need. The lead time needed for each milestone might vary, but sending function-specific “how to” messages shortly before they are needed might just become a welcome communication.

We hope these options are either useful as is or that they lead you toward other ideas.

What do others think? Can you relate to the need “Flabbergasted” raised? Do you have additional suggestions? Please share your thoughts with our TOPkit community on LinkedIn!

Do please reply in this forum and share your thoughts.
Best wishes until next month!

Posting of brief questions is invited here. “ADDIE” will reply periodically, but community replies are welcomed also. Navigate to our TOPkit community on LinkedIn! to ask a question!

Author and Editor: Dr. Kelvin Thompson

Dear ADDIE:
We provide our faculty with an array of training options, from full “programs” to become an online instructor, developer or peer reviewer, to short courses which include topics like using YouTube effectively, creating presentations in Google Slides and using Jing. Faculty seem to love our educational opportunities and get a lot out of them, but recently I’m hearing through the grapevine that a number of faculty aren’t retaining the “how to” skills. Unfortunately, they don’t want to admit this to us so that we can help! What can we do to prevent this problem in the future, and how can we help our faculty refresh their skills without losing face?

Signed,
Focused on Faculty Not Forgetting

Dear Focused:

Thanks for raising an important question!

First, a little digression. You’ve hinted at a crucial principle for those of us engaged in preparing online faculty to be successful: evaluating the effectiveness of our efforts. Of course, we can (and should!) collect data formally as part of an evaluation plan (e.g., post-training survey, post-teaching interviews, etc.). However, you’ve highlighted the ubiquitous “grapevine,” and this kind of informal, anecdotal feedback is not to be overlooked! Quite often issues emerge more quickly through our relationships than through our formal channels, and attending to such themes keeps our work relevant and responsive. Obviously, we must not overreact, being careful to validate and vet such “grapevine” intel before determining an appropriate course of action. We are choosing to believe that you have concluded that the skills retention problem you’ve mentioned is indeed a valid issue.

Now, to the two-part question at hand. How do we help faculty retain the skills they’ve learned, and how can we support them in refreshing skills without embarrassment?

Many tasks associated with online teaching are highly contextualized, and some of these, especially those of a technical nature, are performed somewhat infrequently (e.g., once per semester). Several concrete suggestions come to mind for supporting the performance of such tasks in a just-in-time manner:

1. [b]Provide job aids.[/b] Some highly contextualized tasks just need some light support and a bit of reminding to trigger the previously developed procedural knowledge. Consider physical cards suitable for pinning up in one’s workspace. One digital analog might be send via email (or alternative messaging system used in your organization) a reminder of common semester start-up (or wrap-up) tasks.
   
2. [b]Design online “micro” content.[/b] Certain tasks might need a bit more support. Break down how-to content to a sensible (practical) level of granularity and, perhaps, make it accessible easily (publicly) online. Centralizing one authoritative source for such content online allows you to make any necessary updates or improvements (e.g., due to a new software version).The more granular the content, the higher the level of reusability. Contextualization can come in a workshop or online training course. Job aids (above) can include a link to the online micro content. Making these online resources public removes yet another potential hurdle (i.e., authentication) and opens up the discoverability of the resources through a common web search.
3. [b]Schedule “drop-in” sessions.[/b] Consider offering opportunities for faculty to come to a convenient location to get help with performing seasonal tasks. This might be in an “open lab” setting, or it might be a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) coffee break or lunch session within a particular academic department. In such a setting, there is no stigma for receiving help. It is the expectation.
4. [b]Cultivate a culture of collaboration.[/b] Admittedly, this is the most challenging of these recommendations and the one squarely not in the control of the instructional designer/faculty developer. However, fostering a culture of interdependence, openness, sharing, and collaboration among faculty means that an instructor who is “stuck” on a task might be quicker to reach out to a knowledgeable colleague than a culture in which every one is on their own and “forgetting” is embarrassing.

You might find one, more, or all of the above suggestions useful. Certainly, they can all be deployed in one integrated whole as a strategy for supporting your online faculty if you wish.

Hoping that helps! Please report back when you can.

If you are reading this column and have additional ideas to share on this topic, please share your thoughts with our TOPkit community on LinkedIn!

Best wishes for more memorable work!