The impact of the cooperative mentorship model on faculty preparedness to develop online courses

Abstract

The 2017 Survey of Faculty Attitudes on Technology conducted by Insider Higher Ed reported on the low percentage of partnerships between university faculty and instructional designers in online course development. Experts were unsurprised because instructional designers (IDs) are underutilized, and their role in higher education is still not clear (Richardson et al., 2019). This qualitative study examined the faculty members’ perceptions (n=11) about their mentorship relationships with IDs when they designed and developed asynchronous online courses together. This study also explored factors that may lead to successful mentorship relationships in which IDs are mentors and faculty members are mentees. The results of this study found that faculty perceived that working cooperatively with IDs was effective because they were able to align resources and instructional strategies with learning outcomes; they used time efficiently; and they were also able to apply acquired skills to the development of online courses. Based on semistructured interviews with the university faculty, this study revealed that motivation, open-mindedness, and working relations were the major factors that affected the cooperative mentorship relationships between faculty and IDs to produce and teach an online course of high quality. These results support findings in previous studies on the effectiveness of collaboration between faculty and IDs in higher education. Moreover, this study found evidence that cooperative mentorship relationships between university faculty and IDs can lead to the development of online courses of high quality. Higher education administration, university faculty, and IDs will benefit from the results of this study.