Faculty Development and eliannual08

Faculty, support staff, and student experiences of using Second Life in three business courses will be presented and compared. The results highlight the good, the bad, and the ugly of using Second Life for teaching and learning.

Given all the web 2.0 tools available, a well-defined process helps time-pressured faculty make choices that promote effectiveness and efficiency, identify resources, and help staff deliver a pedagogically sound product. We will discuss project stages, how a decision is made to pursue a project, faculty engagement, project tracking, and project assessment.

Members of a faculty learning community from a large urban research university will share the results of a study comparing expectations for technology use among faculty and students. Participants will engage in dialogue to address the presence (or absence) of a digital disconnect between teachers and learners and discuss the implications for instructional practice.

Additional contributors: Dina Bangdel, Teresa (Terry) J. Carter, Ed.D., and Frances (Fran) G. Smith, Ed.S., CVE, Virginia Commonwealth University.

This session will demonstrate and discuss the importance of linking leadership, course redesign, and evaluation in order to improve the quality of the student learning experience in higher education.

We know our students are different, but in many cases we have not prepared our campuses to support their expectations. Additionally, faculty are pushing us to provide innovative ways to meet our students where they are. In this session, we will share our vision for a platform for digital expression.

This session will provide an overview of a collaborative model for the design and support of effective online courses developed by a faculty member, an instructional designer, and a librarian. Find out how collaboration can draw upon and enhance individual expertise, model positive social presence, and facilitate the development of effective cognitive and teaching presence as described by Garrison, Anderson, and Archer’s community of inquiry framework.

To explore the potential of virtual worlds, Notre Dame faculty are developing demonstration projects and a white paper. This session will demonstrate the applications of Second Life and share opportunities and challenges presented by virtual worlds.

The educational potential of Second Life is still emerging and for the majority of educators, even early adopters of technology, it is an entirely new domain. This session will describe the objectives, rationale, and outcomes of a pilot initiative in which we introduced faculty and instructional staff to Second Life.

UMBC has published online reports showing by discipline and by instructor which Blackboard courses are most active. Initial feedback suggests that regularly publishing these simple but effective reports could create a "tipping point" of one-on-one and departmental pedagogical discussions that change the form and content of institutional faculty support.

With the recent explosion of new technologies and teaching methodologies, supporting faculty has become a much more complex task. Campus leadership has responded to this challenge in varying ways. Our study builds on knowledge gained from experimentations and explores new models of campus-level support that will better serve faculty in a rapidly evolving world.