Faculty Development
How NOT to Teach Online: A Story in Two Parts
April 11, 2013 | Filed in: Online Learning
by Bonnie Stewart
Here’s a little secret: when I started teaching people how to teach online, I had no clue what I was doing. It was 1998. I was a graduate student, without extensive computer skills or even teaching experience. I’d been a high school English teacher for a few years, and I’d taught GED classes, but my online facilitation background was limited to helping students figure out how to search song lyrics on Altavista. Then I took a part-time job for my university coordinating a fledgling online M.Ed program. This was new stuff, then, with few best practices available to build on. The college had bought a bright and shiny “online learning platform” and it was my role to facilitate seminars teaching faculty how to use it. Just as soon as I figured it out myself.
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Here’s a little secret: when I started teaching people how to teach online, I had no clue what I was doing. It was 1998. I was a graduate student, without extensive computer skills or even teaching experience. I’d been a high school English teacher for a few years, and I’d taught GED classes, but my online facilitation background was limited to helping students figure out how to search song lyrics on Altavista. Then I took a part-time job for my university coordinating a fledgling online M.Ed program. This was new stuff, then, with few best practices available to build on. The college had bought a bright and shiny “online learning platform” and it was my role to facilitate seminars teaching faculty how to use it. Just as soon as I figured it out myself.
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Flipping Faculty Development: Teacher Training and Open Education
May 10, 2012 | Filed in: Profession
by Pete Rorabaugh
A thread in the Chronicle of Higher Ed tagged “Adjunct Life”, MLA President Michael Berube’s recent open letter, and New Faculty Majority’s National Summit illuminate higher ed's slide into contingency. It should be worrisome to all of us that the price of a degree has gone up even as institutions are relying on more and more contingent (and thus cheaper) faculty. According to the AAUP, more than 50% of higher ed faculty in the US are part-time and 68% are non-tenure-track. But whether permanent or contingent, how is the higher ed instructor pool trained to do its job? Universities are inconsistent in their answers to this question. While a few institutions do pedagogically prepare their teachers to varying extents, others offer little in the way of new faculty training, privileging content-area expertise over expertise in the practice of teaching. Yesterday I had a Twitter conversation with some peers about the preparation and development they remember from their first days as an instructor. One of my colleagues, Diane Jakacki replied, "Zero. [I was] Lucky enough to TA for someone who taught by example and trained me."
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A thread in the Chronicle of Higher Ed tagged “Adjunct Life”, MLA President Michael Berube’s recent open letter, and New Faculty Majority’s National Summit illuminate higher ed's slide into contingency. It should be worrisome to all of us that the price of a degree has gone up even as institutions are relying on more and more contingent (and thus cheaper) faculty. According to the AAUP, more than 50% of higher ed faculty in the US are part-time and 68% are non-tenure-track. But whether permanent or contingent, how is the higher ed instructor pool trained to do its job? Universities are inconsistent in their answers to this question. While a few institutions do pedagogically prepare their teachers to varying extents, others offer little in the way of new faculty training, privileging content-area expertise over expertise in the practice of teaching. Yesterday I had a Twitter conversation with some peers about the preparation and development they remember from their first days as an instructor. One of my colleagues, Diane Jakacki replied, "Zero. [I was] Lucky enough to TA for someone who taught by example and trained me."
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