For the past four months, I have been co-facilitating a full year faculty development program with Liesel Knaack and Michael Paskevicius. We arrived at the idea of offering this program by acknowledging that while many institutes of higher education design and facilitate support programs for faculty, these programs are often limited in time and content. These limitations can result in programs akin to ineffective crash courses in academic survival skills (Diaz et al. 2009). For this reason, we were interested in maximizing everyone’s use of time, as well as maximizing participants’ engagement with content, by designing a year-long program that utilized a blended approach. Blended learning is defined as a combination of traditional face-to-face (f2f) instruction and online instruction (Drysdale, Graham, Spring & Halverson, 2013; Graham, 2013). A further advantage to using a blended approach was that it enabled us to model methods of online instruction by having faculty engaged as participants on our institution’s learning management system (LMS). We are now halfway through the program.
The program consists of four online modules, with each module concentrating on a different theme related to teaching and learning in higher education. These themes are:
- Universal Design for Learning: How do you make learning accessible for all students?
- Formative and Summative Assessment: How do you know your students have learned?
- Teaching and Learning Strategies: How do you plan lessons that scaffold learning through well-constructed learning opportunities to aid in deep learning?
- Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: How do you build an easy-to-do inquiry project into your own practice?
For each module we create a variety of activities and tasks for faculty to engage with on the VIULearn (Desire2Learn) course site. These activities include guided reflections, readings, reading responses, discussions, small group activities, and pairwork.
These activities spiral toward creating opportunities for faculty to share their thoughts and insights in follow-up f2f sessions. At the end of the online segment, participants come together for a 3 hour f2f session with the whole group (currently 14 participants) and us (the facilitators) to discuss and reflect on their learning over the previous weeks. We usually construct online tasks and activities that culminate in the creation of an artifact that is then brought and shared during our f2f meeting. In this way, the blended model allows faculty participants to work online over the course of a month for roughly 4-6 hours of online activity, engage in thinking about their practice as it relates to the theory, and prepare to share their experiences and their earning in a f2f interdisciplinary setting.
Halfway through the program, I find myself reflecting on the process thus far, contemplating how the program is evolving, what I am noticing, and how these reflections influence moving forward with this and other faculty development programs. One of the strongest observations I have had thus far relates to the power of being part of a community of interdisciplinary colleagues who might otherwise not have an opportunity to connect. When the group last came together for a face-to-face session, we did a quick check-in. We went around the room inviting everyone to share where they were at, both in the program and in life. Most participants admitted being “under water,” and generally overwhelmed with marking and other end of term tasks. There was a sense of collective commiseration, a “we’re in it together” feeling, and a sense of relief, or perhaps hope, knowing that everyone was struggling, and busy and overwhelmed. But we were all still there, keen to listen and keen to learn.
From there, we moved into a sharing activity that participants had prepared for during their online experiences that month. Members worked in smaller groups to share examples of their assessment and evaluation methods. What I noticed when I sat in on these groups, was an enthusiasm, perhaps even a gusto, to listen to group members share their ideas, their methods, and their challenges related to assessment and evaluation. I noted my own goosebumps being present amid the power of cross-disciplinary sharing. I love breaking through the silos and hearing an instructor of criminology discuss a public poster-presentation assignment and seeing an instructor of nursing clearly becoming inspired, wondering how the assignment could be tweaked or altered within her own course context. As instructors, we can get caught up in our signature pedagogies (Shulman, 2005), and for good reason, but there is something powerful about going beyond our own disciplinary boundaries, seeking inspiration and perhaps confirmation, from other fields. This is what I love, and what I am noticing most acutely as a facilitator of this program. Stay tuned…
Resources
Diaz, V., Garret, P.B., Kinley, E.R., Moore, J.F., Schwartz, C.M., & Kohrman, P. (2009). Faculty development for the 21st century. EDUCAUSE Review, 44(3), 46-55.
Drysdale, J.S., Graham, C.R., Spring, K.J., & Halverson, L.R. (2013). An analysis of research trends in dissertations and theses studying blended learning. The Internet and Higher Education, 17, (90-100)
Graham, C. R. (2013). Emerging practice and research in blended learning. In M. G. Moore (Ed.), Handbook of distance education (3rd ed., pp. 333– 350). New York, NY: Routledge.
Shulman, L.S. (2005). Signature pedagogies in the professions. Daedalus, 134, 52-59.