Agenda:

7:30am – 9:00am Registration and Coffee

9:00am – 9:15am Introductions and Welcome

9:15am – 10:00am iTEAM: Opening the Door to Your Online Success
Speaker: Dede Hourican, Support Specialist, Academic Technology & eLearning, Marist College

With colleges transitioning to the online format, many faculty may hide from technology training. iTEAM (Innovative Technology Education Around Marist) supports technology shy Faculty by offering a team of highly trained students from the department of Academic Technology and Help Desk, who on a once weekly schedule, visit each academic building on campus, to assist the faculty with their questions on using Sakai and other innovative teaching technology.

This well received and student sustained program offers a less costly avenue to successfully implement faculty technology training, marketing of new technologies while preparing the students for real world business situations while informing the campus as a whole of reminders on upcoming training workshops.

10:00am - 10:15am Break

10:15am – 11:00am Facilitated Learning - Lessons Learned
Presenters: 
David Perkinson, Classroom Technology Specialist, Roxbury Community College
Ruth Ronan, Instructional Designer, Roxbury Community College

This ten week course, designed for community college faculty, explored characteristics of the adult learner and instructional best practices in the community college setting. It focuses on the principles of adult education, variables that affect the community college learner, appropriate learner-centered instructional methodologies, and outcomes-based assessment procedures. The course is parallel to a graduate level course and has been extremely successful in engaging faculty in the challenging work of continuous improvement. Presented in a blended format, this course offered insights to online and blended methodologies, and brought new understanding of technology to a diverse array of faculty. We will discuss the content of the course, as well as hits and misses from this pilot program.

11:00am – 11:45am How Competency-Based Assessment Informs Training Faculty to Teach Online
Presenters: 
Reta Chaffee, Director of Educational Technology, Granite State College
Steve Covello, Rich Media Specialist, Granite State College

This interactive session addresses the challenges encountered when our faculty training program for teaching online moved from a “one size fits all” approach to a competency-based program. When we developed our list of competencies, we discovered that faculty arrived with a greater range of experiential entry points than we realized. It required a complete redesign of our professional development program based on the diversity of individual faculty needs.

Our challenges are to provide an efficient, scalable, and sustainable competency-based faculty professional development system that accounts for the full range of competencies faculty need to master in order to support our goal to provide high quality online learning. This session will share our experiences and expand the discussion of a competency-based program.

11:45am – 12:45pm Lunch

12:45pm – 1:30pm FLO: Facilitating Learning Online
Presenter: Ren Whitaker, Senior Instructional Designer, Brown University

FLO (Facilitating Learning Online) is a four-week online course, in which Brown faculty and instructors experience what it’s like to be an online learner from the STUDENT perspective, and safely explore our Learning Management System before they develop and launch their own course.

Throughout the course, participants consider how they will adjust their teaching practice through researched-based content, assignments, and facilitator-lead discussions that demonstrate how effective online learning can be, when properly designed and facilitated.

We have found that FLO graduates consistently design more effective and engaging courses, and lead their courses with greater efficiency, fewer frustrations, and more enjoyment.

1:30pm - 1:45pm Break

1:45pm - 2:30pm Blackboard Learn Mastery through a Multimodal Approach
Presenters: 
Paula Dinneen, Instructional Designer, University of Massachusetts - Boston
Gene Shwalb, Senior Instructional Designer, University of Massachusetts - Boston 
Irene Yukhananov, Senior Instructional Designer, University of Massachusetts – Boston

Starting in 2012 during the institution-wide migration to a new LMS platform Blackboard 9.1 Learn, UMass Boston Instructional Support Team developed a well-structured and feature rich professional development program for its faculty. The IS Team created a distributed learning environment, designed to better meet needs of adjunct and virtual faculty members at University of Massachusetts Boston.

First, we started using a new training method by enrolling faculty cohorts into self-paced web-based Blackboard training modules, which were fully developed in-house by the UMB instructional designers. Later, these training modules were enhanced with best practices, instructional design tips and creatively complemented with Atomic Learning video tutorials; all these tools being fully integrated into Bb training modules which faculty can access from any computer with the internet connection. Next, we created a video infomercial, and offered workshops, face-to-face mode or as webinars, to support the updates and changes that Blackboard Learn continues to go through.

This new training method provides a multimodal learning experience for faculty, so they can choose the way they want to learn.

2:30pm - 3:00pm Wrap up discussion and reflections

3:00pm End