MVCR is a series of online faculty development courses offered by the award-winning Illinois Online Network (ION), which is "a collaboration of forty-eight community colleges and the University of Illinois working together to advance utilization of Internet-based instruction and service throughout the state of Illinois." ION is one of the few statewide faculty development initiatives in the United States.

ION, which is currently administered by University Outreach and Public Service of the University of Illinois, began under the University of Illinois Online, which is a central source for information regarding the online degree programs, online courses and public service activities offered by the three campuses of the University of Illinois: Chicago, Springfield and Urbana-Champaign.

Grant Gets Online Training Started

Started in 1997 through a Higher Education Cooperation Act (HECA) grant of $125,000, ION initially offered face-to-face faculty development workshops led by Iris Stovall (now director of Illinois Virtual Campus) and Tom Ramage (now Associate Vice President for Information Sciences at Parkland College), who frequently traveled to 10 community colleges within a 200 mile radius, providing site-based training about online teaching to interested faculty. Around the same time, ION also began hosting an annual Faculty Summer Institute, which today "brings together over 200 faculty, support staff, and administrators from throughout Illinois for three days to collaborate on the integration of networked information technologies into the curriculum."

"While we believed that these face-to-face faculty development opportunities offered by ION were helping community college faculty, we felt that an asynchronous online course could be more effective in preparing faculty to teach online, allowing faculty to experience online learning from a student’s perspective and to explore issues in more depth," said Michael Lindeman, ION director. "We also liked the fact that we wouldn’t have to travel as much."

Helping to steer that effort was former ION staff member Jennifer Lieberman, who was a graduate of the UCLA Extension’s Online Teaching Program. Lieberman spearheaded the development of a fully online introductory course titled "Online Learning: An Overview," which became the springboard for the entire MVCR program as it is today, which has grown into ten eight-week courses and two advanced seminars.

Since 1997, ION has watched its grant funding increase gradually to ultimately support all 48 Illinois colleges, allowing for faculty, primarily from community colleges throughout the state, to enroll in MVCR courses for free. "After four years of continuous funding, the state decided to continue this indefinitely, and they rolled a quarter of a million dollars into the budget to continue to operate ION and benefit faculty throughout the state, " said Burks Oakley, associate vice president for academic affairs and director of the University of Illinois Online.

"Along the way, the other thing that happened was really a stroke of genius," continued Oakley. "In order to offer enough sections of these courses, we started hiring community college faculty in Illinois who had taken these courses and had become extremely qualified online teachers themselves. We hired them as adjunct instructors. Then we opened up these courses nationally and internationally and charged tuition for people who were not supported by Illinois state funds. We have been able to supplement the state appropriations. With the tuition revenue, we have been able to hire more adjuncts to offer more sections."

"The adjunct instructors have been essential to our success," added Lindeman. "In 1999, with a staff of three people, we were only able to offer 12 sections. Now, with 12 active adjunct instructors on board, we are able to offer 35 sections and better meet the needs of the faculty."

Incidentally, Lindeman noted that adjuncts who teach these eight-week online courses are paid a little better than what they would typically earn teaching a 16-week face-to-face course at a local community college.

Today, in addition to providing free online teacher training to faculty from ION-member institutions, the MVCR program has enrolled tuition-paying students from all over the U.S. and internationally, including enrollments coming out of Saudi Arabia, China, Brazil, Egypt, Italy, Germany, and more.

Additionally, students who successfully complete four core courses, one elective and one practicum offered by MVCR can earn a certificate from ION indicating they are qualified as a "Master Online Teacher." The practicum involves students working with peers and an instructor to develop or improve an online course. As noted on the MVCR Web site, "during the practicum, individuals demonstrate their practical knowledge of online course design and creation by incorporating appropriate roles for faculty and students, choosing technology suitable to the audience, creating and assigning effective summative and formative online assessments, demonstrating the communicative nature of online courses, and following sound online design principles." Oakley noted that this practicum experience is "pretty novel in terms of faculty development."

MVCR courses can also be taken for academic graduate credit through the University of Illinois at Springfield (UIS). To earn academic credit, students must first enroll as a non-degree or as a degree student through UIS. MVCR courses can also be taken for continuing education credit. However, it is not possible to convert CEU credits to academic credit after a course has been completed.

"The fact is if you are going to teach an online course, or your institution is moving in the direction of offering online courses, the best thing you can do is experience being an online student," said Oakley. "The faculty who enroll as students get to see a course that has very good instructional design, and they get to see what a model facilitator does to facilitate a discussion. They get to see what it is like to be a student and interact with people and learn how to study, reflect and discuss online everything from pedagogy to the technology involved in online education."

Reference:
Varvel, Virgil E; Lindeman, Michael; Stoval, Iris K. The Illinois Online Network is Making the Virtual Classroom a Reality: Study of an Exemplary Faculty Development Program. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks (July 2003). http://www.aln.org/publications/jaln/v7n2/v7n2_varvel.asp

Note: This paper examines the programs and resources that ION provides (which includes much more than MVCR) the effectiveness of the ION program as a whole, and the lessons learned about providing a large-scale faculty development program.