The online medium nurtures dialogue among faculty coming from different disciplines and levels of experience.
Two years ago, I was asked to assess the needs of new faculty hires at my college, Kapi’olani Community College, in Honolulu, and to design a program that would support new faculty through their first year. I discovered a funny contradiction. On the one hand, new faculty crave guidance and eagerly attend that first day of new faculty orientation. On the other hand, overwhelmed and confused, it is not surprising that new faculty cry out, “Leave me alone, let me sort this out for myself,” and attendance at workshops declines as the semester proceeds. Furthermore, seasoned faculty are becoming overloaded with committees, hiring, accreditation and the development of student learning outcomes; and for this busy group, attendance at workshops is always the first to go.
I realized that it was time to think seriously about what kind of professional development experiences we could provide and how we wanted to provide them. The first thing we did was to focus our professional development work by articulating specific professional development outcomes — faculty learning outcomes, or FLOs. This seems so obvious, but many colleges never articulate exactly what they hope to achieve through their professional development programs. One of our FLOs was to “create connections among faculty,” both within the new faculty cohort and with seasoned faculty members. We also wanted to create both interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary connections, as well as connections across our seven-campus system. It was time to take professional development online.
Some of the online activities we have since planned or implemented (in addition to the obvious things, such as a campus intranet and online handbook) include a “happy blog” where faculty can post successful experiences implementing new pedagogies; an online coaching database and “open classroom” calendar where faculty can connect with mentors, online teleconferences and archives of others and online delivery of training for our new course management system. But our most successful online faculty development experiment is the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development’s Learning Scenarios Course, “Teaching for Learning,” which we provide for all new faculty across our seven-campus system. Analysis of the discussion boards tells us about the benefits of online faculty development and how it is experienced by different faculty groups: new faculty, seasoned faculty and faculty from different disciplinary backgrounds.
