Piloting a Faculty Institute for Online Teaching

As an institution, Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) has been delivering distance education for decades and internet-based courses for 15 years. This long history has been both beneficial and challenging. On the one hand, we have not been met with resistance to the idea of online education that many institutions have faced, because our faculty already have a history of participation. The faculty have been teaching online courses for many years and have developed their own individual methodology for how to best deliver these courses. On the other hand, as most of the knowledge came about empirically through faculty developing online teaching methods on an individual basis, we did not have a formalized professional development opportunities for faculty who wanted to become engaged in online teaching or improve their current offerings. Much research has been done in the last several years to highlight the best practices in online learning. To better benefit from this research, we launched a pilot effort to create a Faculty Institute for Online Teaching. The goal of this effort is to inform the understanding of what it means to deliver a high-quality online experience to students from around the globe. These best practices include organization of courses and programs within the learning management system, designing lectures for online delivery, feedback timelines, student to faculty engagement, and peer to peer engagement. This Institute had 30 participants enrolled in the pilot, and 73% completed, resulting in 22 new or substantially modified online courses being delivered. Introduction/Background WPI has been delivering distance education for over 30 years. For the university, this began with video-tape based distance learning in 1980 when the then Management Department (now School of Business) developed a partnership with a few key companies to deliver the MBA program at their locations. As was often the case at that time, the enrollments for the on-site program were low and the program shifted to video-taped lectures rather than face-to-face instruction. The Fire Protection Engineering program soon learned that there was great demand for their program outside of the state and began distance education via video-taped lectures as well. In 1999, the current WPI President, included distance learning at the graduate level in the university’s mission statement and strategic plan. This prompted the first investment into resources to support distance learning and the university began to hire support staff and seek tools to drive distance learning. The university signed on with Blackboard for course management in 1999, and was one of the first 6 universities to do so. A distance learning team consisting of academic technologists and marketing was assembled in 2000. Another engineering program launched a distance learning program via video-tapes at this time as well. At the same time the university was starting to be constrained by the capacity of the TV studio to capture lectures on video, the department head for the management program also began to feel that video-taped lectures were not the most effective and made the move to 100% online delivery in 2001. This meant that lectures were to be recorded separately for online delivery. By 2005, the university fully transitioned away from video-tape to online courses as high speed Internet access and the resources for students became more commonplace. WPI has historically been at the forefront of distance learning. We were one of the first nationally-ranked institutions to embrace online education and were an early adopter of technology. The university has continued to add resources to support online education and the faculty have consistently put a great deal of effort into online education. That effort and early adoption however, has also led to a challenge in terms of faculty development and ensuring online content is kept both fresh and current. The university’s path to building online learning was quite “home grown” in nature. The faculty identified what they believed to be the best methods to deliver online education. Faculty put a great deal of effort into course development and were using the best methods and technology available at the time. They learned by doing and became proficient on their own, without any guidance or any type of quality metrics to benchmark. Growth in Online Education and the Need for Quality Online education at WPI has grown steadily over the past several years. In the fall of 2015, there were 633 part-time students enrolled in online courses compared to just 129 in 2007. Additionally, full-time, campus-based students are opting to take online sections of courses at higher rates, increasing the enrollment in online courses at WPI significantly. According to “Grade Change: Tracking Online Education in the United States”, the number students taking at least one online course grew by 412,000 students from fall 2011 to fall 2012. This brought the total to 1.7 million students taking at least one online course and online enrollment as a percentage of total enrollment to 33.5%, the highest since they began this study in 2002 (Allen and Seamen, 2014). While enrollment in online programs and courses is growing, the need for quality and consistency in online education is also increasing. Early on, students opted for online courses simply as a matter of convenience. However, students today are smart consumers, with many choices about which university to attend for their online education, making the online education market extremely competitive. The quality of the online program and interaction with instructors are key factors in a student’s decision about which school to select. While many of WPI’s online programs are more niche, there is at least one other school offering even our unique programs, in many cases at a lower tuition cost. Therefore, the quality of our online course delivery, coupled with the support we provide to students, must be a key differentiator for us. According to a 2015 study titled “Online College Students 2015: Comprehensive Data on Demands and Preferences”, a joint project of The Learning House, Inc. and Aslanian Market Research led by Dr. David L. Clinefelter and Carol Aslanian, key concerns with online learning included: Perceptions of quality of online study – 27% of respondents Inconsistent/poor contact and communication with instructors – 21% of respondents Lack of direct contact with other students – 17% of respondents Inconsistent/poor quality of instruction – 17% of respondents The only two other concerns with a higher number of respondents were motivation/attention/focus challenges at 27% and cost at 16% (Clinefelter and Aslanian, 2015). When you review the data about online student preferences, it very quickly becomes clear that online course delivery quality is very important. The other striking feature of this data about student preferences is that it is largely controlled by the instructor in the course, with the only exception being the general perceptions of online quality compared to face to face delivery. Factors such as instructor communication and contact with other students are often taken for granted when first transitioning to teaching online from the classroom. At WPI, our own online students told us we were not doing well in these areas. We began a comprehensive annual satisfaction survey of our online students in academic year 2014-2015. Feedback from that survey heavily indicated that our online courses were falling short in terms of instructor-tostudent and student-to-student interaction. Additionally, students indicated that courses within their online program were often inconsistent, in that each instructor managed their course the way those chose, with no uniformity throughout the program. In 2015, UPCEA published the “Hallmarks of Excellence in Online Leadership”, identifying seven facets of leadership and organizational development for online education. Number three, Faculty Support, focuses on the need to provide faculty with the training, tools, support, and design resources to be successful. They highlight the key factors of onboarding, ongoing professional development and the course design-team approach as critical to success. We have a responsibility to prepare faculty for online teaching and provide them with opportunities to continue to build their skills (UPCEA, 2015). This began our journey to develop quality standards for our university, along with a program to develop our faculty’s skills for teaching online. The Need for Resources for Faculty When our faculty are approached to teach online, one of the common questions or concerns raised is the level of effort to convert a traditionally face-to-face class to an online format. In 2007, to proactively address quality concerns discussed in the previous section, we developed a checklist to provide as a resource for faculty so that they would have an idea what the expectations were of them as they prepared their content for online delivery. Over the years, as quality and online faculty development has evolved in higher education, our checklist has been added to and revised based on internal and external feedback from those that have utilized it. However, our checklist was never formally incorporated into our processes as an evaluative method for assessing quality in our online programs. We knew that needed to change, especially as reputable and high-quality evaluative scoring instruments like Quality Matters and the OLC Pillars have mainstreamed in higher education for ensuring quality in online programs. In 2015, a robust Best Practices for Online Teaching checklist was developed for use within WPI. The checklist was the result of extensive research and benchmarking of proven models such as the Quality Matters and OLC Pillars. Along with this, a best practice syllabus template was developed as well. These were endorsed by t