Preparing Excellent Online Education for Next Semester (Part 3 of 4)
KRISTEN FERGUSON
Although we do not know exactly how the COVID-19 pandemic will impact our institutions in the coming semesters, we do know that online education will likely be an important factor in our strategic planning. With time being the missing element to excellent online education in our current term, institutions can attempt to get ahead of the next semester now by taking into consideration some preparation tips to execute online education on a larger scale.
Some institutions are better prepared for an influx of online courses than others. Larger institutions typically have an online office with instructional designers and videographers, while smaller institutions may have a few key faculty that have run point for the online endeavors of the school. Regardless of your current setup, an influx of online courses and/or students will add to the load of your online support team and faculty. Here are some ways to offload that burden now so that your next semester can be even better:
Establish best practice principles. If the only people who know what good online education looks like at your school are in the online office, then you are going to have a bottleneck when your professors try to access their specialized knowledge. One way to mitigate that bottleneck is by producing your school’s best practices in online education. This can be a simple document that includes bullet pointed principles that make online education work well in your context. With those established guidelines (not necessarily rules), your faculty and adjuncts can at least have a starting point on how to begin adjusting for next semester.
Provide research. Along with your best practices, your faculty would likely appreciate knowing some of the research. They might not have the time or desire to know it all, but it definitely helps among academics to support those best practices with evidence from the field as well as qualitative data from your own online students. A bibliography and quick student survey may help give some grounding to the implementation of your best practices.
Offer synchronous and asynchronous training. Once you know how you want your online education to operate from a principled standpoint, it’s time to train, train, and train some more. Some schools have a strong faculty development strategy in place already which likely means those professors are more ready for online education than others, but regardless, offering specific training about technology and pedagogy will be helpful. Since most professors are pretty overwhelmed with the current transition, you may decide to offer both live training on a regular schedule as well as recorded training for them to view later.
Foster collaboration. You can spread out the burden of helping all the faculty by allowing professors to talk to one another about what works and what doesn’t. Connecting your whole faculty to your most experienced online professors, online educators in the field, and even to students can help foster a community of learning, attempting, and evaluating online education. It also serves the secondary purpose of supporting buy-in among faculty as well as fine-tuning your best practices with faculty input. Collaboration can take the form of discussion boards in a faculty only online course, video conference sessions, or even a simple email group (depending on how large your faculty is).
Begin syllabi creation early and give feedback. Syllabus creation will need to look a bit different if you are moving towards more online courses next semester. Instead of faculty members reusing their syllabi from previous semesters, you will want to encourage them to take a fresh look at their learning objectives to consider the best way to accomplish those online. It is important to understand that your learning objectives do not need to change, but they can be accomplished in different ways given the technology and distance learning. You can also get feedback from other professors or the online office about your syllabus if you can get it done earlier than normal.
Build templates. Your online office can duplicate their efforts by creating some templates that can be distributed and adapted as needed. For example, maybe you need a homepage for each course that includes the course information, tech support contact, and other institutional policies. The online office might create something that can be imported into each course and then modified by the professor. Other templates like discussion board instructions, assignment instructions, tech support verbiage, and other commonly used items can help fast track some of the online course creation.
Streamline tech support. Without direction, your faculty and students will likely bombard the IT and online office with questions. Instead, perhaps communicate where to access FAQs, video tutorials, and specific information regularly and clearly. You can create a one-stop web page with that information so that a URL can be the email response for many inquiries. Keep communicating and sending people to those resources that they learn to go there first and then ask if they can’t resolve their question through that source. This allows your IT team and online office to work triage tougher cases instead of spending the majority of time answering the same question over and over.
As you consider implementing some of these preparation tips, you may notice that you are actually modeling to them what you want them to do in the online classroom. You are providing well-researched content, varying your teaching methods, supporting community interaction, setting clear expectations, and communicating consistently. As your professors partake in the online education you are providing for them, they may even experience for themselves some of the key ways to implement excellent online teaching.
Kristen Ferguson (Ed.D.) serves as Director of Online Education at Gateway Seminary.