Page 32 - Campus Technology, January/February 2020

2019
Improving Online Teaching
Through Training and Support
Kapi‘olani Community College instituted comprehensive training to help faculty design, develop and assess online courses — including supportive incentives to make sure instructors can successfully complete the program.
By Dian Schaffhauser
At Hawaii’s Kapi’olani Community College on the island of Oahu, a growing demand for online courses sparked a need for more faculty training, to help instructors create or convert their courses for online delivery. So when Instructional Designer Helen Torigoe was asked to “do something about training the online faculty,” she looked for a way to scale her experiences at a previous campus working individually with online instructors. When online instructors struggled through building their courses, she recalled, what really helped them was when they could see the course from the perspective of a student.
Torigoe decided that if she could create a program that would help those instructors engage in their training as students themselves, the “lightbulb” might go off for them. “I wanted
to create an environment where they could come out with something that they can use right away,” she explained.
The result, the Teaching Online Prep Program (TOPP), is a faculty professional development program put on by the Center for Excellence in Learning, Teaching and Technology that places a group of participants into a mostly online course on Laulima, the institution’s instance of Sakai, which serves as a model for what they’re creating themselves. Among the technologies used in TOPP: Zoom, for synchronous online class meetings, office hours, group project meetings, presentations and screencasting; Padlet, for collaboration and building an online learning community; Flipgrid, for building an online learning community and facilitating collaborative learning; Adobe Spark, for creating custom
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | Jan/Feb 2020
Photos: Courtesy of Kapi’olani Community College