Leveraging Open Educational Resources to design your custom faculty development program

Concurrent Session 3
Streamed Session

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Brief Abstract

Two open educational resources – customizable faculty development courses for teaching online – will be made available to participants. After a brief review of the two sample courses, participants will create a custom course outline that identifies how these courses may be adapted for their own training goals.

Presenters

Lead Presenter: Wendy Howard, University of Central Florida

Dr. Wendy Howard is the Program Director of the Pegasus Innovation Lab at the University of Central Florida, which is an incubator of experimental projects focused on digital learning innovations that can be developed and refined through rapid prototyping and then promoted throughout the university to maximize collective impact on student success at scale. With over twenty years of experience in both instructional design and teaching, her current research is focused on faculty development, collaborative online learning and internationalizing the curriculum through technology.

Co-presenter: Ashley Salter, University of Central Florida

Ashley is an Instructional Designer at the University of Central Florida, Center for Distributed Learning. Prior to joining the CDL team, Ashley taught in the K-12 environment where she developed her skill set to advance and apply effective teaching practices. Her current research interests include professional development for teaching online, application of emerging technologies, and the use of OER materials.

Co-presenter: Shelly Wyatt, University of Central Florida

Shelly Wyatt is an instructional designer in the Center for Distributed Learning at the University of Central Florida. She earned her PhD in instructional technology from UCF in 2013.

Additional Authors

Jessica Tojo, University of Central Florida

Jessica Tojo is an Instructional Designer at the University of Central Florida’s Center for Distributed Learning (CDL). Jessica earned a B.S. degree in Early Childhood Education from the University of Central Florida in 2007 and taught elementary school for eight years. Her interest to enhance learning through the integration of technology led her to pursue an M.A. in Educational Technology which she received from UCF in 2011. Her research interests include personalized adaptive learning, the use of OER materials, and accessibility.

Tags

OLC Accelerate 2017 Professional Development and Support Faculty Faculty development Instructors OER Online Online community Online course development Professional development Quality instruction Staff development Training

Extended Abstract

Intro

Building a comprehensive faculty development course for teaching online can be a daunting task, particularly for smaller institutions with limited resources. In addition to the time required to adequately analyze, design, and develop a complete course from scratch, it can be difficult to stay on top of all the evolving trends in our field. Open Educational Resources like the sample courses provided under Creative Commons licensing on the Teaching Online Preparation Toolkit may be leveraged to decrease development time and resources.

In support of the State University System of Florida Board of Governors 2025 Strategic Plan for Online Education, a team of instructional designers at the University of Central Florida produced two sample courses that could easily be adopted by other institutions for their own faculty development. One course is structured as a 10-week facilitated course, and the “lite” version is modified as a 5-week fully online course that may be self-paced or facilitated. The two sample online faculty development courses based on UCF’s award winning IDL6543 are provided for downloading and importing into a learning management system. These courses are a distillation of the key elements of IDL6543 that institutions may use—as is, or modified—to train their own faculty. The content is of the same high quality that UCF has used to train its own faculty.

A workshop approach will allow participants to explore the two sample courses through the lens of their own institutional context and build a custom course outline that identifies elements of the sample courses that may be easily adopted for their own training program.

This Workshop

This workshop is intended for anyone interested in building a faculty development course from the ground up or for those who are interested in a significant update of their existing professional development offering. This session will provide the opportunity to view two sample courses, discuss the differences, and begin to build an outline for an actual professional development offering utilizing one of the sample course cartridges available for download.

Learning Objectives

After completing this workshop, participants will be able to:

  • Describe your own institutional context for developing a faculty development program

  • Articulate whether the sample course(s) will be used to enhance current training or used to create new professional development opportunities.

  • Describe the differences in the sample courses offered.

  • Arrange/Assemble topics of course outline

  • Use the materials in the sample course to create a personalized professional development course outline.

Activities

At the completion of this workshop participants are expected to have considered a set of getting started questions, explored the sample courses online, developed a rough outline of their professional development course, and discussed initial ideas for implementation. A brief overview of the proposed agenda is listed with time allocations followed by a detailed description of each of the main activities.

Agenda:

  • (10 min) Getting Started Questions/Small group discussion

  • (10 min) Overview & preview of two sample courses

  • (20 min) Build your own course outline

  • (5 min) Debrief & wrap up

Getting Started Questions/Small group discussion

Workshop leaders will introduce the session with a set of guiding questions to first situate participants’ thinking. The "getting started" questions provide participants an opportunity to brainstorm the big picture of their professional development plans and consider the specific needs of their online teaching faculty. In pairs, participants will have a brief opportunity to discuss their unique institutional contexts and their impact on their professional development offerings.  

Overview of two sample courses

The Teaching Online Preparation Toolkit (TOPkit) features two free, open access sample courses that are available to instructional designers and faculty developers for the purpose of preparing faculty to teach online.  These courses are downloadable as an IMS common cartridge that can be imported into an LMS and customized to meet the needs of individual institutions.  While each sample course is a complete, customizable course, one version (Sample Course) features a 10-week, facilitated course structure while the other version (Sample Course Lite) features a 5-week, self-paced or facilitated structure.  The Sample Course takes approximately 80 hours to complete while the Sample Course Lite takes approximately 40 hours. During the workshop, the facilitators will provide a brief overview of these courses and where to publicly access them. Participants will then be given time to independently review the features and functions of these courses to assess which components they would like to use and how to best customize them.

Build Your Own Course Online

Building your course online constitutes the core activity of this workshop. A showcase of professional development topics are provided within the sample courses for customization. These topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Accessibility & Universal Design for Learning;

  • Open Educational Resources;

  • Interaction, Collaboration & Group Work Strategies;

  • Online Assessments & Assessment Tools;

  • Managing Academic Integrity & Honesty in the Online Environment;

  • LMS Training;

  • Campus Resources;

  • Web Vet Strategies;

  • Online Teaching Persona;

  • FERPA & Copyright;

  • Library Services;

  • Bloom’s Taxonomy & Course Objectives;

  • Group, Collaboration, and Conferencing Tools;

  • Online Classroom Dynamics;

  • Content Delivery and Logistics, and

  • Emerging Technology.

Participants will develop course goals and objectives to generate an outline using the sample outline template. A template in digital format will be made available on the OLC website before the workshop begins, and additional printed copies will also be available at the OLC workshop.

Debrief & wrap up

The debrief & wrap up of the workshop will highlight key findings and connect activities to objectives and allow for reflection on participant experiences. Facilitators will host a brief discussion of implementation options and provide recommended steps for implementation. A professional resource will also be introduced where participants may continue this dialogue post workshop and further collaborate on effective practices for faculty development online.

Takeaway

The OER faculty development courses provide a roadmap for participants to build their individual faculty development program. Participants will walk away from this workshop with a draft outline of their course, a downloaded course cartridge that they may customize, and a resource to continue to collaborate as they implement.