In Their Own Voices: Concerns and Suggestions about Training and Development

The following quotations represent some of the concerns and suggestions about training and development that were voiced by both national and local survey respondents:

Concerns

"My greatest concern is that we continue to offer online courses without the proper support for instructors or the kinds of pedagogical discussions that are essential to this move to eLearning."

"People need to realize . . . that folks new to teaching online need technical and PEDAGOGICAL help when starting to work online. . . . Also, support for new faculty needs to be longitudinal and directed at what faculty (and I would add students) want to get out of writing in an online environment, regardless of what it looks like."

"I think that they are letting people fend for themselves . . . ."

"I do think faculty should not be permitted to teach online until they have taken a course online and until they have completed WebCT training."

"We seem to have a huge lack of preparation and development, with the exception of a fairly short training process to use CMCs. The rest is up to the individual—very scary."

" I think most faculty are given a cursory training in how to use software but are not given any help learning HOW to teach online. The result is too many online courses consist of some Word documents and PowerPoint presentations in a cms . . . with a list of reading and writing assignments and not much more."

Suggestions

"Have a training session for new online teachers, and give sample syllabi and handouts for activities that work well online."

"I do think that there is a need for more formal training. In my department . . . teachers are assigned to teach online classes, but do not always have experience and training. We learn as we go along, which is helpful, but there are some things we should know before the course starts. Through informal conversation, I learned a lot about what works and what doesn't work in online writing classes. However, it would be helpful to have more formal forums to discuss the logistics and implementation of online writing classes."

"The institution could better support online teaching by offering seminars in online pedagogy, rather than just offering classes on the technical aspects of the classroom programs."

"[Offer a] preparation seminar for beginning online writing teachers, {an] opportunity/forum for discussion among online instructors, [and] mentoring between newbies and veterans."

"Set up a working community of online teachers so we could meet to share our experiences."

"[We need] workshops that tie pedagogy—writing pedagogy, specifically—to online teaching. Workshops that focus not on software/technology but on using those technologies (multimedia) to provide students with significant learning experiences online."

"[I would like to see workshops on] adapting existing in-classroom materials for online learning, creating online course content, and setting student expectations for online learning courses."

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