Abstract
This article explores various models of online faculty development programs as described in the literature, and finds that they fall into a wide range of models from those that are highly structured to more organically grown examples. The Online Teaching Fellows program at the University of Rhode Island is shown to be an example of an internally-created course that follows best practices of both the structured and organic models. The author's experience as a participant in the course is described illustrating how the lessons learned informed his strategies for effective teaching in an online credit course in information literacy.
Highlights
In their report on online education in the United States for the Sloan Consortium, Allen & Seaman (2011) found that there is no one way that institutions train faculty to teach online
Six percent of institutions that offer online courses do not have some kind of training; that is down from the nineteen percent reported in their 2009 survey
This has been the case at the University of Rhode Island (URI) where the Provost’s office recognized the need for pedagogical support for online instructors and authorized the Online Teaching Fellows program during the spring semester of 2011
Summary
In their report on online education in the United States for the Sloan Consortium, Allen & Seaman (2011) found that there is no one way that institutions train faculty to teach online. Six percent of institutions that offer online courses do not have some kind of training; that is down from the nineteen percent reported in their 2009 survey. Seventy-two percent offer internally-created training courses and fifty-eight percent offer informal mentoring with fewer institutions using formal mentoring in training online instructors. All forms of training had increased in the two year period between reports with the highest increase among internallyrun programs. This has been the case at the University of Rhode Island (URI) where the Provost’s office recognized the need for pedagogical support for online instructors and authorized the Online Teaching Fellows program during the spring semester of 2011. This article shows how URI fits into this mix of programs, and tells the personal story of my participation in this online professional development course for distance learning instructors as well as the lessons I learned and applied to my asynchronous credit course on information literacy
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