The World Campus Professional Development Program strives to provide learning opportunities for faculty and staff to support the authoring, development, and delivery skills fundamental to facilitating success in distance learning courses offered through the World Campus.
Guiding Principles
The design, development, and delivery of Penn State's World Campus Faculty Development Program is based on three guiding principles:
- To provide faculty with continuous improvement opportunities in distance learning technologies and pedagogies
- To create a teaching community of faculty involved in online education through a flexible and varied program format
- To impact the quality and knowledge of distance learning at Penn State
Continuous Improvement in Distance Learning
Three primary topic areas are addressed in the design of the Faculty Development Program. These include pedagogical, administrative, and technical issues that impact building effective asynchronous learning communities online. Each of these topic areas affect the faculty's ability to communicate, guide, and facilitate and administer to students in the online learning environment. The pedagogical topics address issues related to the design of instruction for online delivery such as student-centered learning activities, problem-based learning, and leading online teams. The administrative topics provide a venue to inform faculty about processes and procedures for working with the World Campus. Administrative topics include information on effective program management, accessing technical support, and why marketing is important to online course success. The final area, technical skills development, is designed and delivered through the Technical Support group of the World Campus. This training provides faculty with the necessary skills to navigate within the learning management system, use the online communications environment, and use the administrative and course tracking functions. Each of our topic areas offers opportunities for faculty with differing needs and skill levels to benefit from participating in the Faculty Development Program.
Online Teaching and Learning Community
As faculty explored the creation and maintenance of teaching and learning environments online, the desire to communicate and grow within a like-community evolved. This desire was expressed from the beginning as the need for a forum for discussing strategies, sharing and challenging ideas, and innovating in practice. Growing out of the Innovations in Distance Education (IDE) grant from the AT&T foundation in 1995, discussions occur in a variety of settings regarding effective practices in distance and online learning. Web-based resources include training through the Faculty Development 101 and World Campus 101 courses, the seminars, and technical training events are also made available.
Impact on the Quality and Knowledge of Online Education at Penn State
From the start of the Faculty Development Program in 1995, the World Campus has worked to broaden the impact of our experiences and positively influence the nature of distance and online education at Penn State. Through open-invitation workshops and seminars to co-branding educational events with other faculty development units at the University, the World Campus has sought to inform, influence, and impact the "state of e-learning." Participation in committee work, conducting local workshops, and offering presentations for departmental meetings has allowed the knowledge and lessons learned from over 100 years of distance learning to be shared and support innovation in teaching and learning.
Conclusion
Penn State's faculty represent the most valuable resource for the success of any educational initiative. The Faculty Development Program has become a primary service of the World Campus program. A strong, active, and responsive program allows us to meet our goals of enhancing the authoring, development, and delivery skills of our faculty members, while serving students around the world. Our strong commitment to faculty development, the variety of topic areas, and our flexibility of delivery, have made the World Campus Faculty Development Program a key element of success.
