Page 25 - Campus Technology, August/September 2017

SPECIAL SECTION: ONLINE LEARNING
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | August/September 2017
encourages faculty to “choose one or two things they can work on improving.” The next time the course is reviewed, the attention can be redirected to something else.
Bringing Naysayers Onboard
Given sufficient exposure to the Primer, reluctant faculty find at least “one thing they can get excited about,” said Strahle. “It’s not instant. It’s not complete,” she emphasized, but it is a start.
She also points instructors to use cases. “Faculty respond to evidence,” she said. “Showing them where it’s worked has been really successful.”
Romanoski prefers to “kill them with kindness.” As he explained, “I praise what they do a lot.” Then he dives into the sales pitch: “There are these new tools that the university has created ....”
“It’s often a massaging process,” he added. “I have seen other instructional designers try to use the hammer to come down on faculty. It doesn’t work. Collaboration is key — you’ve got to let the faculty know that all the work they’ve done over the last 10, 15, 20 years is solid, because it is!”
Dian Schaffhauser is a senior contributing editor for Campus Technology.
Share what you develop. The Office of Digital Learning team is charged with helping only those faculty members who deliver courses within UA Online. However, they’ll
also grant access to the online resources for all University of Arizona instructors outside of the program.
Use on-demand. UA Online doesn’t follow a set start and end date for online course development; faculty dip into the Primer whenever they want. However, ODL does propose a timeline when a specific course is under construction: “To launch in January 2018, here’s where you should be in fall 2017.” At any given time, the instructional designers estimate, they’re working with about 20 faculty members, each at a different point in the course design or redesign process.
Partnerships are paramount. The university has an Office of Instruction & Assessment, which handles teaching online in any form. UA Online works “closely” with that group, according to ODL Associate Director Angela Gunder. While ODL handles course design, OIA tackles pedagogy and facilitation. That office teaches a course called “Introduction to Teaching Online,” which ODL promotes to faculty. ODL also pushes Online Learning Consortium courses on how to teach online. As an institutional member of the consortium, Gunder said, “We have found a lot of joy in sending folks there for more instruction. The folks who have done that have been quite successful.”
There’s no reason to stick with a single set of quality rubrics. Although UA Online uses the Quality Matters rubrics for designing excellent online courses, that’s not its only source of guidance. ODL also uses resources from the Quality Online Learning and Teaching program from the California State University system and the Open SUNY Course Quality Review Rubric and Process.