Page 35 - Campus Technology, January/February 2020

organized “Recharge” workshops to continue the learning, and Dooley has set up “spotlights,” where the online faculty meet to hear from four or five of their peers about course strategies: how they’ve have laid out their courses, how they’re teaching certain topics or facilitating elements like small group projects and forum discussions. Those are crucial, said Torigoe, because “there’s a lot of learning that goes on at those sessions without any instructional designer being involved. They’re really learning from each other.”
CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT
Just as TOPP training never really ends for its faculty participants, TOPP itself is always undergoing revision, said Torigoe. The crew would like to develop the next training, with more advanced techniques, which she referred to as “TOPP 2.0.” But the next most critical step, she added, is doing course quality review built on TOPP. While the college has studied industry-standard frameworks for online courses, such as those from Quality Matters and the Online Learning Consortium, Torigoe expected that Kapi’olani would handle the rubric creation in-house, so that “it will really cater to our own faculty.”
In the meantime, she insisted, it’s too soon to quantify the influence of TOPP on student success. While some 80 instructors have gone through the training to create or recreate their online courses, they’re really “still learning,” Torigoe said. However, she doesn’t want to discount the sense of “empowerment” faculty have expressed. “To me that’s a lot more real evidence of the impact of the program. People will say, ‘Oh, I was afraid of teaching online before TOPP, but now this has really given me so many ideas and tools and empowered me to be a more confident teacher,’ or ‘The navigation of the course is so clear now. Students love it.’ That gives me a lot of excitement and also hope that we will be able to affect more online courses going forward.”
Dian Schaffhauser is a senior contributing editor for Campus Technology.
A TOPP SYLLABUS
WEEK 1: “Distance Education, Rules, and Regulations,” where online instructors learn about pedagogy, rules and best practices for teaching online.
WEEK 2: “Planning an Online Course,” in which they plan their online courses by semester, weeks and activities/objectives and create a homepage.
WEEK 3: “Laulima Tools,” where they learn and practice using the college’s instance of Sakai and upload the syllabus to their online course.
WEEK 4: “Building the Content Using Laulima Lessons Tool,” in which participants create “orientation,” “week 1” and “week 2” pages; produce two assignments; create a rubric to evaluate an assignment; and submit “project #1,” an instructor introduction video captioned and embedded into the orientation page.
WEEK 5: “Continue Building the Content and Screencast,” where they finish building three lesson pages, two assignments and one rubric; and explore Web 2.0 tools to build community or increase student engagement, such as Padlet and Flipgrid.
WEEK 6: “Building a Learning Community and the Facilitation Skills,” in which faculty add a forum discussion; explore and create a screencast of a demonstration or a lecture (project #2); and evaluate their TOPP experiences.
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