Hi

The best method I've found is to create the training course online.  This puts the instructors in the role of student and gives them a very different perspective about what they will be doing.  Spread the class over five or so weeks and have them create their course during this time if that is part of their assignment.  If not they can have plenty of time to review the course that they will use.

Monitor the new instructors for two semesters to determine if they are applying the instructional strategies that are policy at the institution.  Coach them through this time so that any former undesirable behavior from a traditional classroom is not carried over.

I was a master trainer where this process was used and it created a good environment for the students, instructors, and elearning administration.

Dear Juliana, I'll be happy if these two recent papers published in our institute of distance education will be helpful to you (in the attached file)

Kindest regards, Ulyana.

http://ido.tsu.ru/files/pub2016/babanskaya-mozhaeva-feschenko.pdf

Conference Paper INTEGRATING MOOCS INTO THE SYSTEM OF LIFELONG LEARNING: TSU EXPERIENCE

Thank you so much Ulyana, I'll read it and give you feed-back.

Juliana, I'm sorry. I've seen a paper on Digital Scholarship among your works. Could you please tell me what would be a definition of scholarship in this word combination? In Russia they translate it similar to wisdom or education but I doubt so much... Thanks!

Indeed, it is a polysemous term.

In the context of my work (but referring of course to a scientific community's work) scholarship is a term  used to define scholars' practices and profession. Scholars are also called "Faculty" and "academics". As noun, it is defined as follows: the qualities, skills, or attainments of a scholar. (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/scholarship) 

Hope that helps :)

Hello,

I have made an extensive work in this topic. Please take a look in my  profile.

Kind regards,

NP

 Hi Juliana, I am working in this moment in a pilot study in my Faculty about using TELEs in Higher education. So far, I can tell you that we use strategies from the literature of course, but some or most of those strategies fail behind the huge issues of organizational culture that we are facing as a school. But, basically we try to design our TELE with a huge participation of the students, and with an open mind, specially from our administrative staff, about what students suggested. Until I have final results, is the best strategy that I can name about it, in my specific case. Cheers!!!

Hi Nikolaos and Fernando,

Thank you very much for your reply. Nikolaos, for sure I'll see your work and comment here. 

Fernando, I completely agree about students' engagement in learning design processes as well as institutional strategies. However my question is about faculty development. Taking into account your suggestion, maybe it would be important to train academics (and further recognize good practices) that engage students as part of their pedagogical innovations. I think there is a research strand dealing with "Students' voice" but I'm not quite sure they have focused specifically the issue of faculty development connected to students' participation. Maybe...

Hi Juliana, i'm working hard on this issue. Check my research project: http://puntozero.github.io/

Mainly working now on developing strategies to involve tutors.

I find helpful distinguishing between emerging technologies and practices

I thank everybody here for sharing interesting links and resources...

by the way: anyone willing to collaborate with me? Juliana?

Have a nice summer

http://www.veletsianos.com/2016/06/13/defining-characteristics-of-emerging-technologies-and-emerging-practices/

Thanks Federico!

Nice projects on the Github.

Yes I read Veletsianos and found him insightful for the research. In fact, there is a gap between what we have as technology and the technological affordances and what the people in specific academic contexts effectively adopt, also as part of their professional identity and agency (practices). The question is: could faculty development help to "mind the gap"?

This is not research-based, but anecdotal and proved effective in our implementation of it.  

My colleagues and I led a series of departmental-sponsored lunches (we got the Dean on board) and then had "Lunch and Learn" series in which those using technologies in the classroom would showcase what they had done and lead a discussion on possible applications elsewhere.  We had some great discussions and many adopted a few new eLearning approaches into their classrooms.

Very interesting Kevin!

Indeed, as most professional development approaches what works most are highly contextualized and informal activities where people is able to circulate their knowledge. Our effort is now to work through a number of case studies, but I'm not satisfied with my analysis of the literature, this is because I'm asking.

Thank you all for your valuable support!

j.

Many years ago, I acquired considerable experience and scars implementing technology in K-8 education.  Based on all that, there may be a few things you might consider for Higher Education -- submitted with no experience in that area:

You might consider:

(1)  Making sure everyone understands what you are doing, or planning to do.  For our K-8 research studies that meant informing school superintendents, principals, parents as well as the instructors.  Might be easier in Higher Education, but Department Heads and Deans might need to be contacted and briefed.

(2) Providing pre-installation training for the instructors.

(3) Providing periodic (weekly?) reports on how each student is doing (progress toward course objectives) in the technology-provided course.

(4) Providing reports that each student might collect for him/herself -- maybe some dashboard such as Prof. Peter Brusilovsky at the University of Pittsburgh is providing to show the student his/her own progress in the course, perhaps by sub-topics, perhaps compared to how the class in general is doing . . .

(Both of these reports may be coded up as after-thoughts, but they turned out to be really important in our experience.)

(5) Having experienced instructors (battle scared veterans of the classroom) periodically visit each instructor using the course just to see how how it is working, whether they understand the instructor reports, whether they use them . . .

(6) Obviously -- making sure technical and system operation support is always readily available.

Good luck!

Hi

The best method I've found is to create the training course online.  This puts the instructors in the role of student and gives them a very different perspective about what they will be doing.  Spread the class over five or so weeks and have them create their course during this time if that is part of their assignment.  If not they can have plenty of time to review the course that they will use.

Monitor the new instructors for two semesters to determine if they are applying the instructional strategies that are policy at the institution.  Coach them through this time so that any former undesirable behavior from a traditional classroom is not carried over.

I was a master trainer where this process was used and it created a good environment for the students, instructors, and elearning administration.

I used a similar design in working with computer science instructors. To gain important course details we added a discussion thread at the end of the course where students were in small groups to discuss what worked for them in the online course and what topics they were having trouble with.  The detail that the students provided was amazingly helpful for the instructor in reframing the online coursework.  The analysis of over 2000 comments from students did take some time but was amazingly helpful in guiding the next revision of the course.

I am an instructional or learning designer supporting faculty development for online course design and online teaching practice.  I am currently filing the gap in fac dev related to social media tool integration by creating some short one week online workshops that focus on various categories of emerging technologies.  However, each workshop has the same technology integration module that offers a couple tech integration frameworks to help faculty leverage the social media tools into the courses effectively or in engaging ways. 

The frameworks are the key and the ones I have using are:

A framework for Web 2.0 learning design

Matt Bower*, John G. Hedberg and Andreas Kuswara, Educational Media International Vol. 47, No. 3, September 2010, 177–198

See also Velestianos book referenced earlier in this forum and see CH 4: Emerging Tech Integration Models.  I am working on developing a matrix for these models to aid faculty decision making - see attached file (in progress).

SAMR is one that is very easy to apply for most disciplines in most contexts, so I use that to help faculty refresh their courses in the small amount of time they have before each new semester.  It maps to Digital Bloom nicely too.

Jane Hart's Top 100 SM Tools is used to support tool choices.

http://c4lpt.co.uk/top100tools/guidebook/

http://c4lpt.co.uk/top100tools/guidebook/

The faculty development strategies play a vital role to adopt e learning. According to me training by an IT expert will not solve the problem. Its a three step process

1. Select motivated faculty who are ready to learn and implement ICT

2. Give training for motivated faculty by IT people and make them implement few strategies

3. Use those faculty as resource persons and conduct faculty development program to the rest of the crowd along with sensitisation of them using the evidence of implementation

This three step process helps in attitudinal change of the other faculty and motivates them to learn and implement.

The course should aim at training in three levels

1. knowledge on preparation of teaching learning media (projected aids)

2. introduction to web 2 and google applications

3. application of these principles in e learning

Anyone leading an initiative for eLearning is creating history for the institution, for better (hopefully) or for worse.

Two principles that we found useful in the diffusion, adoption and change of new technologies, processes or practice includes:

a)       Professor-friendliness: assuming you have done your due diligence on the functionality and robustness (very important if you don’t want mud in your face – high availability, resilience, back-up/recovery, etc), the platform, system, tool or process must be “professor friendly”. By this, I mean it must be easy for faculty (many with big egos) to learn and use. “Professor friendly”, in case you are wondering, by my definition, is lower than “user-friendly”. Getting this wrong will result in rejection and your relevance, and add a heavy toll to faculty support and training.

b)      Usefulness: there is a difference between “usefulness” and “user-friendly”. Many systems are the latter, especially when no faculty is not consulted, or IT folks are involved in the evaluation (they love long feature list, rather than focus on learner-teacher benefits). If the system is not useful, nobody will use it, even if it is the most user-friendly system in the world.

So: f(diffusion, adoption, happiness) = professor-friendly (gentle learning curve, intuitive) + usefulness (productivity in  teaching, learner-centric, social learning)

You know  you have got it right when students are asking faculty why, unlike others, they are not using the useful professor-friendly system.

Dear all,

I keep learning from your answers.

So if I properly grasped your directions and suggestions we should:

1- Take into consideration an appropriate institutional strategy and positive context for the promotion of faculty development measures aimed to adopt eLearning.

2- Provide accurate technological environments, coaching and support along the process of learning. 

3- Generate professional learning opportunities that are informal and based on intrinsic professional motivation (with a group of innovators) that would be appealing for a further group of skeptics or even laggards.

4- Provide accurate feed-back and the possibility to groups debriefings on ongoing experiments with eLearning.

5- Take into consideration models of technology integration, to go from "doing the same better/augmented" to "transforming what we do" (that is, teaching). 

I'm trying to see what the literature says about the issue, but I guess that your responses made it clear in just hours!

I created a Mendeley group where you can access the publications I'm reading on the issue, in case it would be of some help for you. 

And what about specific disciplines? Are there subject fields where the academics are more reluctant to adopt technologies? Other where it is easier? 

Thanks a million JD, Carla, Margaret, Rick, Shiva, James, Daniel!!!

https://www.mendeley.com/groups/9170431/faculty-development-for-the-adoption-of-elearning/papers/

Identify eLearning competencies for faculty and coordinate associated technology skill development programs.

http://www.uco.edu/cece/systemAssets/UCOeLearningStrategicPlan.pdf

I have that providing on-demand support for faculty in the process of technology adoption helps as they are able to move forward if they get stuck. The latter gives them motivation to keep trying new technologies:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263767251_Championing_Blended_Learning_in_Higher_Education_Reflections_on_Lessons_Learnt?ev=prf_pub

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/291523527_Flexible_Learning_Environments-Theories-Trends-Issues?ev=prf_pub

Best regards,

Debra

Conference Paper Championing Blended Learning in Higher Education: Reflection...

Data Flexible Learning Environments-Theories-Trends-Issues

One of your key words is "enforce." In my experience, you cannot force faculty to do anything, or enforce quality in any way -- at a University. In K12, it is different. 

You can, however, promote quality. For that, I would recommend learning about teh QualityMatters program, or the iNACOL standards, and make QM's services available to faculty. 

i'm doing the same in the healthcare and medicine higher and degree education..lot to be done still..

The word that sticks out in your post is 'quality.' So much is said, written about online learning without addressing what quality is or could be. At that point any number of jingoistic 'isms' and 'ologies' are thrown in, that it can become impossible to see what is actually being discussed. I made a study of the implementation of online learning and found that the issue of how online learning will differ from the distance model, in terms of assessment, was the biggest issue. Why - because this meant a 'head-on' encounter with entrenched views on 'government standards.' and hence 'quality'. 

Concerns about faculty workload as a significant obstacle to e-learning adoption

Faculty perceptions of e-learning greatly influence the diffusion of innovation and acceptance of online programs.

Source - Baiyun, C. (2009). Barriers to adoption of technology-mediated distance education in higher education institutions. Quarterly Review of Distance Education, 10(4), 333-338

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