Kathryn Fletcher
ABSTRACT
At West Virginia University (WVU), the Office of Information Technology and the Instructional Technology Resource Center (ITRC) have been teaching a variety of online faculty development workshops since the spring of 2008. We currently use Blackboard Vista and Wimba Classroom as our platforms to deliver self-paced workshops and synchronous live webinars. This paper summarizes refinements we have made over the past four years based on lessons learned while developing our current program. Issues include managing enrollment and providing follow-up support in addition to workshop design and delivery. Future challenges face our online workshop development efforts as WVU prepares to migrate to Blackboard Learn 9 and Blackboard Collaborate products over the next two years.
- Fletcher, Kathryn. 2008. Blazing training trails with Wimba Classroom to Avoid travelling 'round the mountain. Proceedings of the 36th Annual ACM SIGUCCS Conference on User Services Conference. (Portland, OR, USA, October 19--22, 2008). SIGUCCS '08. ACM, New York, NY, 181--186. DOI=http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1449956.1450011 Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Fletcher, Kathryn. 2010. Diary of a Trainer: Learning to Create Online Learning Experience, Proceedings of the 38th Annual ACM SIGUCCS Conference on User Services Conference. (Norfolk, VA, USA, October 19--22, 2010). SIGUCCS '108. ACM, New York, NY, 257--264. DOI= 10.1145/1878335.1878399 Google ScholarDigital Library
- Quality Matters Program. http://www.qmprogram.org/Google Scholar
- WVU Faculty Development. http://wvufaculty.wvu.edu/development/Google Scholar
- WVU Instructional Technology Resource Center. http://oit.wvu.edu/itrc/Google Scholar
- WVU Office of Information Technology: Application Support and Training. http://oit.wvu.edu/ast/Google Scholar
Index Terms
- Fine tuning online faculty development workshops
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Reviews
Barrett Hazeltine
The evolution of online faculty development workshops over the past four years at West Virginia University is described in this paper. The workshop platforms included Blackboard Vista and Wimba Classroom. Additionally, a workshop on Turnitin was given. The major difficulty seems to lie in gaining faculty participation. No workshop had more than 22 faculty members in attendance. The authors conclude that the best procedures would be to structure the content to fit half-days face-to-face, to complete the development of a workshop before the workshop begins, to limit workshops to two weeks, to announce the workshops through the Provost's Office, and to use email to remind participants. Details of the workshops are described. This paper would be of strong interest to those organizing or refining online faculty development efforts. General readers would not likely be interested because it is hard to see how the conclusions can be generalized. Online Computing Reviews Service
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