The Distance Learning staff collaborates with lead and affiliate faculty to design and develop online courses. The staff is comprised of a director, assistant director, 5 instructional designers, three web developers, a web production manager, media specialist, videographer, administrative manager for the learning management system, and an administrative coordinator.

Educational Pathways recently spoke with Carole Hruskocy, instructional designer for SPS Distance Learning, and Tina Parscal, faculty member and assistant director for SPS Distance Learning, about how Regis University trains new online faculty and develops online courses.

Parscal coordinates both the assessment and training of new online faculty. Hiring affiliate faculty originates with academic units, where the assessment process begins with a review of all incoming curriculum vitae. Incidentally, Parscal claims that, in many programs, Regis does very little searching for new affiliate faculty and is rarely short of qualified candidates because of an established referral network from existing faculty.

In particular, SPS seeks affiliate faculty with strong academic credentials and professional work experience. "We are also high on currency of information," says Parscal, referring to a potential candidate’s knowledge and applicability of modern practices within his or her discipline. In addition to reviewing curriculum vitae, the academic units conduct telephone interviews. The most promising candidates are referred to Parscal, who then administers a one-week online facilitation assessment.

The following six criteria are used to gauge a prospective faculty member’s successful completion of the online assessment:

"Basically, we look at their ability and potential to facilitate online instruction," Parscal says. "We look at their technical skills, their ability to communicate effectively online and their ability to understand, articulate and apply the Regis Jesuit mission. We ask them to write a mission essay that is reviewed by myself and a representative from their academic unit. They are also asked to grade a student paper. In that, we look at their ability to use electronic tools to evaluate and provide feedback on the paper. Their technical skills are also evaluated."

Based on the results of each candidate’s online assessment, Parscal writes up an evaluation with her recommendations. The proper academic unit reviews Parscal’s evaluation and ultimately makes a final decision of recommendation or conditional recommendation.

These newly recommended online faculty are then required to take a two-week online course titled Teaching Online Preparation (TOP), also facilitated by Parscal. Much of the focus is on how to facilitate effective online courses. Each day of the course, which includes working over the weekends, is packed with readings, strategies, techniques, and hands-on assignments. Best practices for online facilitation are modeled throughout the entire course. "There’s a great deal of reflection on effective practices for online course facilitation; in particular, we look at the different techniques for managing discussion threads, how to write robust discussion questions that support the learning outcomes and how to provide formative and summative feedback" says Parscal.

The first week, for instance, covers topics such as adult learning, intellectual property, ethical teaching, crafting discussion questions for higher-order thinking, creating an introduction and setting expectations. The second week covers course management, the facilitation of learning communities, administering assessments, how to utilize Regis resources and much more.

At the undergraduate level, new affiliate faculty are required to do an internship for one course in which they shadow a seasoned online faculty member and teach one week of the course, all without compensation. Internships are optional at the graduate level.

Also, new online faculty are not compensated during the online facilitation assessment and training processes. Once faculty begin in their paid position, pay scales are based on a per-student rate.

When asked about retention rates of affiliated faculty, Parscal said that there’s very little turnover. "We really vet our faculty a great deal before they are put inside a course. We try to find folks who are a good fit for the Regis model and the Regis mission."

New affiliate faculty, in addition to being assigned courses to teach, become part of a Regis network of subject matter experts (SMEs), who assist with the development of courses.

Carole Hruskocy and her instructional design and development team come into play during the course development process. Hruskocy provides her instructional design expertise specifically for the online MBA program. There are four additional instructional designers who work with various other online academic units. About 300 online courses have been developed for SPS; new courses are created each year, and existing courses are consistently revised to stay current. The SPS Distance Learning unit manages approximately 60 to 70 new course development or revision projects annually as well over 100 minor repairs.

An enterprise model is the framework of the Regis course development (CD) process. A CD team comprised of an instructional designer, SMEs and a lead faculty/developer collaborate on course design. "We typically work with two SMEs per course," says Hruskocy. "We coach them in instructional design principles, and we talk about learning outcomes and course goals. We do topic maps of the course, and we move forward with the deliverables." An educational technology production team, that typically includes a web developer, media specialist and a videographer, also comes into play later in the entire course development process. The CD team also collaborates with university resources, such as the distance learning librarian and the coordinator of SPS service learning.

The entire course development process takes approximately eight months and follows a phased development approach. The phases include predevelopment, conceptualization and design, content development, production, quality assurance, and summative evaluation (see "Regis University Objectives and Goals of Distance Learning Course Development Process").

Everything begins with the predevelopment phase. This involves the selection of courses by deans and lead faculty to develop for the upcoming term. The courses are then placed on a master schedule, outlining the development and production schedule.

During the next-to-follow conceptualization and design phase, the instructional designer meets with the CD team, introducing an SPS online course development workbook to the faculty/developer and SMEs. The workbook must be completed and handed off to the instructional designer within an agreed-upon deadline.

The workbook is fairly intense and carefully laid out. During the first phase of planning, it is noted that while online courses have the same learning outcomes as other courses, there is a whole array of teaching tools and strategies available that are different.

Some of the key elements of the workbook include

After completing the workbook, the CD team meets again to start the next phase, which is the content development phase. This phase focuses on the development of the first two weeks of an eight-week course. "We walk through our expectations for those two weeks and provide an outline for what elements we are looking for," Hruskocy says. "We ask them to deliver an overview of the course, the weekly outcomes, assignments, the core content, and some sort of conclusion or looking-ahead section." Hruskocy explains how the CD team will now begin to ask what topics in the online course could be considered the most difficult for students to understand. "Where do you have the most questions? What areas do you find yourself emphasizing again and again?" From this vantage point, the CD team begins to collaborate with the production team to conceptualize media-support options that might help to more effectively communicate key course concepts.

Once the SMEs and lead faculty/developer collaborate and deliver their work to the instructional designer, an iterative process with feedback, comments, and meetings takes root. "We make changes to what’s being submitted while at the same time starting to submit fresh weeks," Hruskocy says. "And this goes on for three to four months."

As the content development phase winds down, the production team comes into the picture on a more proactive basis, with more collaboration with the instructional designer for the actual creation of media components that have been planned into the course design. This production phase typically takes another four months. During this time, the content and media are carried over to be produced into the course management system, which at press time was transitioning to ANGEL Learning. "We are labeling it Regis University World Class," Parscal says.

Hruskocy refers to current media production processes as "the next generation of online learning," where the old replication of lectures online has been eliminated. "We’re moving away from 30-minute video pieces, and we are applying a new standard of no more than a six- to eight-minute video clip at a time," she says. Plus, the older video lecture model was typically not connected to any purposeful learning outcome for the student. "We are trying to tie media more specifically into either a formal discussion, or some type of assignment or learning activity," says Hruskocy. Once affiliate faculty start to actually teach online, support continues to come from SPS distance learning staff as well as from the academic units. Additionally, most courses have facilitator guide publications produced during the CD process.

As for where online faculty come from, Parscal mentions that during the early years they were Regis full-time faculty who transferred from the classroom to online. "Then we attracted affiliate faculty from across the region. Now we are drawing affiliate faculty worldwide. We’re seeing more and more individuals who teach for other institutions, but I’d say the majority are novices."

Hruskocy notes that she is starting to see affiliate faculty coming from a pool of former online graduate students. "Many of these individuals are chomping at the bit to get out there and start teaching online," says Parscal. She adds that seasoned faculty are adding online courses to their teaching repertoire. "They are looking at this as a retirement option. I’m seeing more Boomers starting to say ‘Gosh, I want to stay engaged, but I want to do it from my condo.’ "