With a little help from your students: A new model for faculty development and online course design

Abstract

Institutions of higher education are faced with the challenge of developing faculty who are ready, willing, and able to teach online. Standard approaches towards faculty develop- ment often miss the dynamic and complex relationship be- tween content, pedagogy, and technology. Our approach has faculty members and graduate students participate in a unique seminar where they work collaboratively to design online courses. We describe our “learning by design” ap- proach and present evidence of how this approach respects the realities and complexities of teaching online. We use evi- dence from multiple sources (interviews, surveys, observa- tions, and artifacts developed) to develop a model of online teaching that posits successful courses require the careful in- tegration of three components that coconstrain each other: content, pedagogy, and technology.