Monday, September 27, 2004

Faculty do not receive enough training in order to teach online

This is not a shocking conclusion. A recent article in The Journal explains the results of a survey that shows clearly that Faculty believe they are not receiving enough training in order to become online teachers.

The interesting thing to me about this article is tied to the conluding recommendations. I quote:

Training for faculty to teach online should contain four major components:

1. Technical training
2. Pedagogical training
3. Mentoring
4. Online coursework


I bet these might surprise you? I have recently experienced resistance from the "powers that be" at my intitution about giving Faculty "pedagogical training." I was a proponent of it and it looks like this article might also support that. In addition, the idea of giving Faculty experience in the Online Environment by giving them Online Coursework exercises during their training is also something I support!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am not surprised at the findings at all. I attend the University of Oregon and have found a great deal of inept instructors in the online departments, specifically the language labs that are required to supplement the foreign language courses. I have also found that software provided by the university is lacking in accessibility - terrible.

Eric said...

Interesting comment. I have a follow-up question for you: the language labs you are speaking about are not online right? If my assumption is correct, why do you believe that onsite staff in a language lab are under-trained or borderline incompetent.

Also, what inaccessible software are you speaking about?

-Eric