AN OVERVIEW OF THE STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK LEARNING NETWORK'S SYSTEM-WIDE TRAINING OF FULLY ONLINE FACULTY

by George Lorenzo

As far back as 1994, Assistant Director of the State University of New York (SUNY) Learning Network (SLN) Alexandra Pickett was designing teaching and learning strategies and processes for the development of fully online courses being offered by multiple institutions in the SUNY system.

Today SLN provides technology infrastructure, instructional design, faculty development, marketing and promotion and technical support services for the development and implementation of online learning courses and programs to more than 40 of the 64 SUNY campuses.

As one of the earliest instructional design professionals in the field of fully online course development in higher education, Pickett has built up a unique and extensive knowledge-base of information that can certainly be useful to faculty, staff, and administrators of any online courses and programs today. In that spirit, Pickett talked with Educational Pathways about her work, sharing many of the lessons she has learned and strategies she has developed over 12 years.

Before There Were Course Management Systems
When Pickett started in this field in ’94 there were no effective course management systems (CMS) on the market. So, she and her colleagues had to bootstrap some tools together for developing online courses. "We were really, really bleeding edge at the time," she exclaims, referring to how she and Larry Greenberg, application developer for SUNY’s Empire State College’s Center for Learning and Technology, spent a full year of research and development to create the first iteration of a robust technology and collaboration system, built on top of Lotus Notes/Domino, to support online courses and faculty training across multiple SUNY institutions.

While this SLN-created CMS has worked well over the years, Pickett explains that there are discussions currently underway "to figure out what our next steps will be." She adds that having a relatively small SLN staff work on the CMS development side has made it difficult to "keep up with the millions of dollars that commercial products have to apply to application development. We have not succeeded in some areas, and we continue to succeed better in others."

An SLN Policy Analysis Committee to the Chancellor recently recommended that SLN maintain Lotus Notes/Domino for the next 36 months and to begin negotiations with "Platform X" to replace Lotus as the SLN single-endorsed platform (see: http://le.suny.edu/wordpress/?page_id=19).

Faculty Development and Course Design
CMS changes aside, Pickett describes how her philosophy has always been that "it’s not about the technology—that an instructor should be able to focus on what they want to teach and how they want to teach it, and students should be able to focus on the learning aspects of their interactions as opposed to learning the technology."

Within this framework Pickett (on the teaching and learning side) and Greenberg (on the technology side) developed a sophisticated faculty-development and course-design system for large numbers of faculty to produce technically and instructionally sound courses and to be effective online educators. This system, which consists of a sophisticated faculty development process and course design process, is facilitated by a small team of SLN instructional and learning designers and trainers, along with 50+ SUNY campus-based multimedia instructional design partners (MIDs). The MIDs, who are experts in the field of online teaching and learning on multiple levels, are not paid employees of SLN and serve as important guides to faculty in the online course design and faculty development processes. They are also the point of contact between faculty and the SLN program.

To date this system has trained more than 3,000 fully online faculty. In the 2004-2005 academic year alone, 4,000+ fully online courses and 107 fully online degree programs were delivered, with 86,000+ student enrollments from the 40+ SUNY campuses.

Pickett’s Methods and Strategies
Describing all the methods and strategies Pickett has created in relation to faculty development and course design can be a cumbersome task. There’s plenty of literature and examples provided at the SLN website in regard to its faculty development processes (see references at the end of this article). This overview is an attempt at condensing this information down by referring to the aforementioned, as well as to some of the papers written by Pickett and her colleagues, along with quoting from the interview Educational Pathways conducted with her.

For Starters: Take an Online Course
The first step in the faculty development process is a month-long online course, called the All Faculty Conference, facilitated by Pickett and an experienced online instructor, where both new and returning SUNY faculty discuss the pedagogical principles and organizational and managerial strategies for designing and delivering a course in an asynchronous environment. Actively participating in an online course is the best method for faculty to learn how to design a fully online course, Pickett says. "You observe how when you read or see things on the screen how literal things are and how the slightest bit of ambiguity or lack of information can completely halt your ability to move forward."

As faculty interact with each other and build a community in this online course, they are also provided with the means to observe live fully online courses being offered by a variety of institutions in a variety of disciplines in the SUNY system. "Part of our strategy is to put peers together," says Pickett, adding that faculty will typically listen more closely to the word of an experienced online faculty member over herself.

Face-to-Face Workshops
Four sequential face-to-face one-day workshops for training faculty are also provided by SLN. Additionally, one instructional design institute, with revolving topics and held both face-to-face and online, is provided for the further development of returning faculty. These are conducted at eight training labs located at various SUNY campuses twice each year, in advance of the Spring and Fall terms.

The workshops, which are led by William Pelz, professor of Psychology at Herkimer County Community College (HCCC), are focused more on asynchronous pedagogy and instructional design than on technology, says Pickett. (In addition to providing the SLN training, Pelz teaches a full load of five courses online at HCCC.)

Two instructional designers are also on hand at the workshops, assisting Pelz with the demonstration elements of the training as well as roaming the classroom, answering one-on-one questions and ensuring that everyone in attendance (especially those with low skills) are up to speed. The designers also handle any technical problems that may occur.

The first three workshops are held over a period of about 15 weeks prior to the start of the next Spring or Fall term. The fourth workshop is held after the online courses have been taught.

The first workshop—"Essentials of Online Course Development and Pedagogy"—introduces faculty to online teaching, the SLN CMS, and their multimedia instructional design partners (MIDs). Faculty are instructed to complete a draft of their course inside the SLN course database that resides in the SLN CMS and to basically work with their assigned MID to plan and design a course that will best achieve the learning outcomes they desire. Faculty are also introduced to SLN’s course creation "wizard," which scaffolds faculty with a quick-start course design template that provides for a consistent course look and feel. The template also has a pedagogical design that is flexible and customizable to the discipline and needs of faculty.

The second workshop—"Instructional Design Roundtable: Implementing SLN’s Best Practices"—is instructional-design intensive, focusing faculty on how to structure their course. For instance, it includes hands-on training for faculty to learn how to organize lectures, orchestrate class discussions, administer tests, and create and manage modules.

The third workshop—"Effective Online Course Management"—transitions faculty from development to delivery. It covers, for example, how to facilitate student-to-student and faculty-to-student interactions and how to establish teaching and social presence in a fully online course. The third workshop also covers the management of written assignments, assessments and evaluations.

MIDs, Templates, Customization, and Pedagogy Over Technology
In between these three workshops faculty are working with their MIDs—"it could be customizing their course information documents, creating a structure for course modules, or putting the content into their modules," among other tasks, says Pickett. "The MIDs help them understand the options and limitations of the online teaching and learning environment. They also have an influence and an impact on the design of the courses. One of the things that is key to SLN’s success is the template we designed. We were able to put in a standard format and standard documents that quick-start faculty so they can concentrate on the customization of their course."

All the elements around the core module contents of a course have already been built into the template, which makes it unnecessary for faculty to think through instructional design questions. The MIDs positively inform the creation of effective courses, helping faculty to ultimately manage and teach fully online courses in a way that as closely as possible relates to their envisioned learning outcomes. "It is all integrated," says Pickett. "It is integrated into the technology; it is integrated into the people; it is integrated into the documentation; it is integrated into every aspect of the program. And it is all focused on pedagogy as opposed to technology."

Evaluate, Revise and Improve
The fourth workshop—"Evaluate, Revise, and Improve Your Online Course"—brings faculty together after they have completed their course. It is basically about revising their online courses in preparation for re-teaching them. Pickett says that a lot of one-on-one instruction and assistance occurs in this workshop, which can cover everything from designing more cooperative and collaborative activities, integrating external learning objects, and utilizing different databases, to facilitating team presentations, using rubrics in the assessment process, developing peer learning groups, and much more.

The fourth workshop also introduces faculty to an online survey tool that "is intended to explore the issues of teaching presence and community in online learning environments." The survey has questions that give faculty the opportunity to reflect upon and evaluate their online course and teaching experiences. The answers produce a report that helps them consider revisions and improvements to their courses.

So, What Has Changed Since 1994?
When asked what has changed most significantly over the past 12 years, Pickett first explains the obvious-technology. Secondly, it’s the learning and discovery that has occurred on a scholarly level with regard to effective online teaching and learning practices, especially from the unique perspective of SLN’s work with multiple institutions and disciplines.

More High-Speed Access
On the technology side, more people have access to high-speed Internet connections. "We know today based on our demographic information we collect that about 20 percent of our total students at any given point are still using 56K modems or lower, but that percentage was much higher only five years ago," Picket says. "So, in terms of multi-media and all those bandwidth-intensive things, it is much easier to integrate those today than it has been in the past."

Research Points to More Teaching and Social Presence
On the scholarly side, "from our vantage point the quantity and quality of the interaction between the instructor and students significantly and positively affects the student satisfaction," Pickett explains (see "How to Facilitate Effective Online Interaction" in this issue). "We saw very quickly that by doing some very small things we could greatly improve the effectiveness of the courses and the level of satisfaction reported from both the faculty and the students."

Pickett says, for instance, that such things as adding a simple discussion area called "Talk to the Professor," or adding regularly scheduled news flashes to an online course can help make students more easily feel the presence of their online instructor. Picket and her colleagues at SLN have gauged and written extensively about teaching and social "presence" and class community in SLN online teaching and learning environments. "There are a variety of different indicators of teaching presence and in social presence that we tried to understand in terms of building a sense of class community," she says (see references below).

Finally, Pickett explains that most of the fun she has had at her job over the past 12 years revolves around "taking the results from research and putting them into practice—making those results have some tangible form in terms of faculty development and actual instructional design or features in our course management system."

References:
Peter Shea, Alexandra Pickett, and William Pelz, "Enhancing Student Satisfaction Through Faculty Development: The Importance of Teaching Presence," Elements of Quality Online Education: Into the Mainstream, Needham, MA: Sloan-C Series, Vol. 5, (2003), www.sloan-c.org/publications/books/volume5.asp

Peter Shea, Alexandra Pickett, and William Pelz, "A Follow-Up Investigation of Teaching Presence in the SUNY Learning Network," Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, Vol. 7, Issue 2, (July 2003),
www.sloan-c.org/publications/jaln/v7n2/index.asp

Alexandra Pickett, "Getting Started With Your First Online Course," excerpted from A Series of Unfortunate Online Events and How to Avoid Them" (unpublished paper), in Sloan-C View, vol. 5, issue 2, (February 2006),
www.sloan-c.org/publications/view/v5n2/viewv5n2.htm

George Lorenzo, "The Importance of Teaching Presence in an Online Learning Environment," Educational Pathways, Vol. 3, Issue 2 (February 2004).

George Lorenzo, "The Definition of Teaching Presence," Educational Pathways, Vol. 3, Issue 2 (February 2004).

SLN Faculty Developer Gateway
www.sln.suny.edu/developer

SLN All Faculty Conference
http://sln.suny.edu/conference

Cool Tools for SUNY Faculty
http://sln.suny.edu/cooltools