At the UCLA Extension, its Distance Learning Programs Department offers primarily CEU-bearing online professional development certificate programs in a wide variety of disciplines - from business (with the largest supply of online offerings), education and engineering to journalism, landscape architecture, fitness instruction, screen writing, and more.

Since 1996, the Extension’s Distance Learning Programs Department has provided courses to more than 30,000 online enrollees, from all 50 states and 80 U.S. territories and foreign countries. In January of 2002, the Extension began to provide a five-week Online Instructor Development (OID) course that its instructors, all of whom are adjuncts, are now mandated to take. Some 429 adjuncts have thus far completed this course.

Unlike the challenges involved with training typically busy, full-time, tenure-seeking faculty the rudiments of online teaching (see story about Penn State World Campus on page 8), this faculty development program does not struggle with getting teachers interested.

Basically, the instructors taking these OID courses don’t get paid until they actually teach an online course. They come into the course excited and ready to learn about what it takes to effectively teach in an online environment. "They are very enthusiastic, and they are very creative," says Karen Hoblit, who is one of three Extension faculty who teach the OID courses, which are offered on a quarterly basis, with each section holding no more than ten instructor trainees. Hoblit teaches about eight sections each year.

Instructors cannot enroll in an OID course no earlier than the quarter before they are actually going to teach. Depending on the instructor’s needs, or the sophistication of the course he or she will be teaching, enrolling in the OID course could occur two or three quarters in advance of the actual start of a course offering. The interim period between finishing OID and the start of their actual teaching contract is for further building out and developing their online course.

In its simplest form, the OID course teaches instructors how to create one mini lesson with one discussion forum, one assessment, a welcome announcement, and one outside reference link. "Once they know how to use these features, they can employ as many weeks as it takes to continue inserting materials and building out the online environment," says Hoblit.

"Basically it is a hands-on practical course that orients the instructor to all the functions of the platform (which is Blackboard), and then it goes into the instructional design of the specific course that they are going to teach," says Director of the UCLA Extension Distance Learning Programs Kathleen McGuire. A good deal of the burden of the course falls on the instructor, she adds, who is required to provide individual attention and full support to each unique faculty enrollee, even after they have completed their course work.

The course instructor also gets help from a pre-assigned course manager who is the single source for both instructors and students regarding any questions and/or issues that may arise during a course, says McGuire. Course managers are also troubleshooters and mediators between students, faculty and the administration. "They have a lot of responsibility, and they have to be politically savvy," she adds. "Their job is also to be the canary in the mine."

Course managers need to be able to anticipate possible problems before they occur, and they must have strong communication skills, as well as be technologically savvy. They go through a three-month intensive training program that has a keen focus on customer service and writing skills before being allowed to interact with students and instructors. McGuire claims that an "enormous" number of students and instructors have thanked her department for the help they have received from course managers on numerous issues. She adds that, despite the added expense of having course managers, they are "absolutely valuable. If there isn’t someone doing this, all those troubled areas, both pedagogical and technical, would go to the instructor."

Regarding the actual make-up of a typical OID class, Hoblit says that there is "a wide variety of skill levels within each group of enrollees. Some are complete novices. They may only know how to do e-mail and Microsoft Word, and they may have done a wonderful job teaching in the classroom and want to learn how to transfer that to the Web. Others come in with a wider variety of skills as far as Internet technologies go. They may have prior experience creating audio files or in designing Web pages. They may know some image-editing techniques."

Hoblit explains that she tries to pair up faculty as "study buddies" to help each other out, in addition to her being available to them to answer any questions and to encourage them to move forward and solve any problems that may occur. She will also ask those who have more experience in the field to volunteer as mentors to those who are less experienced. "We kind of bond as a group when we get started," she says.

Of course, no faculty development program would be worth its weight without a good portion of it being devoted to online pedagogy. "We talk about pedagogy and how to convert an on-campus presence or personality to the Web and how to set the tone for your course, whether you want a very formal tone to your course as opposed to a very conversational type of environment," says Hoblit. "A lot depends on the subject." The UCLA Extension, for example, being based in Los Angles, has a number of courses that are related to the entertainment industry, which would obviously be considerably different than an online statistics course. "People who are screen writers, for instance, like a lot of group discussion because they do a lot of peer review of their scripts, whereas a person teaching anatomy or physiology may not have as much group discussion."

Finally Hoblit explains that, overall, some faculty are very comfortable with teaching online and others are not. "There are some people who are just so excited to be doing this that it becomes almost an addiction. They are constantly tweaking their materials; they are constantly trying new things. It’s just a lot of fun for them. The more progress they make with their students, the more passionate they become about fine tuning their courses."

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