Training Programs for Online Teaching

[spork]

A large portion of faculty at my campus did not have online teaching experience before Covid-19, and many of them did nothing with the university's LMS to enhance their face-to-face courses. Now I'm one of the people in charge of trying to get these people trained in the fundamentals of online teaching. There are commercially-available training programs for this, Quality Matters probably being the most well-known. People here seem to regard Quality Matters as the gold standard. I took a Quality Matters course many years ago; it was ok but not spectacular -- probably too basic to be of much benefit to me.

In evaluating options, I see that a university subscription to Quality Matters is $1,750. Subscribing allows faculty members to register for courses at a discount, but the courses still usually cost $150 or more per person. The company's website, in terms of organization, is very clicky and text heavy. It reminds me of old versions of Blackboard and, in my opinion, does not reflect good user experience design principles. There's a big contrast between the layout and, for example, the introduction to online teaching package offered by LX Pathways/iDesign -- which happens to be free, at least for now. I'm wondering if the actual Quality Matters course content is similarly designed.

My question: does the cost of Quality Matters really reflect the benefit one gets from its products?

[polly_mer]

When I was in charge of online education for Super Dinky, the benefit of Quality Matters was worth the price with several caveats.

1) The aspiring-to-teach-online professors were matched with relevant courses according to what the professors needed, generally not following the suggested full certification route to become course reviewers.

2) The aspiring-to-teach-online professors really wanted to teach online and thus would put real effort into learning during the two-week courses.  I wasted more than one tuition on someone who just failed to complete the course during the allotted time with no personal crisis or other reasonable "oh, this was the wrong two weeks to be enrolled" unexpected situation.  There's no refund or extension for failure to complete on time.

3) The aspiring-to-teach-online professors were somehow in such a position that most of what they needed was a different perspective, not actual support from a course designer.  Quality Matters in no way helps the professors when the real need is course design or other institutional support to ensure that the materials are modified to work well online, of sufficient volume while high quality including accessibility that students could learn whatever is being taught, and posted in a timely manner instead of 10 minutes after they were supposed to be available.

In short, some parts of Quality Matters can be a useful complement to other parts of a high quality online program.  However, it is not at all the same as having sufficient course designers to work with professors over months/years to create a course with high quality material or having sufficient clerks to do the grunt work of uploading, linking, and formatting so the professor focuses on content and delivery.

If an institution goes full out to have regular course reviews after the course designers, clerks, and professors do their things and ensure that the content remains current with no broken links, then QM is also useful, but that again assumes significant investment by the institution in online courses, not just letting faculty do whatever they want and hoping it's enough.

Having seen good online courses and also what happens when faculty are told to convert their courses for next term with just the one QM course, I would put my resources first into hiring and supporting course designers, clerks, and other support staff over having random faculty take one QM course.  However, several QM courses + the institutional membership is far cheaper in a year than hiring even just one clerk.

[spork]

Has anyone ever taken Magna Pubs' "Developing and Teaching an Online Course"? Looking for opinions.

Coursera has a free course starting today: "Learning to Teach Online"

[irina42]

Our university's eLearning department is awesome and covers the cost of workshops through both Quality Matters and the Online Learning Consortium (uni has subscriptions for both).  I've done just about every QM workshop (certified as Master Reviewer; have 3 courses certified myself), and I agree that the QM workshops/courses can be good for (a) introducing people to specific concepts in online teaching, and (b) helping provide time/space for intermediate-level online instructors.  The workshops are pretty canned (same assessments, discussions, etc. across each iteration; the QM instructors are probably working from scripts) and while I have used some of the things I've done in workshops in my courses, the most valuable thing for me was that dedicated time to think and develop my plan for how I would teach the class.

Another thing about Quality Matters is that it's only course design, not delivery.  So the rubric will help you with determining whether and how to set up an online discussion, but not how to manage or facilitate it.

The Online Learning Consortium subscription is new for us this year, and I'm going to be doing my first workshop with them this summer.  They've got a lot of free resources (www.onlinelearningconsortium.org) on their website that you could check out, and if memory serves, their "scorecards" for evaluating course elements are also freely available (though I think you need to sign up/provide your email).

I only just discovered Magna Pubs via your post, so I can't comment on that, but just from browsing the website, I'm neutral to trending "this sounds hoaky" on it.

[spork]

Something that I am noticing about many of these "training programs": there is a lot of talking/reading about online teaching, but little actual building of anything. As in "Go into your new, blank Canvas course shell. Here are the steps to import pre-designed student task X from Canvas Commons into your course shell. Now modify that artifact to suit your specific needs using these steps. Now duplicate it as needed within your course shell and alter the dates/instructions."

[irina42]

If you're looking for how-tos on specific things in the LMS, most of the major brands have youtube channels.  (I think I've watched almost every D2L Brightspace video tutorial, haha.)  Canvas also has one: https://www.youtube.com/user/CanvasLMS

[mamselle]

Posting in part to bookmark...and to seek input as well.

I'm in a different (private teaching) setup at present, but that could change, and these issues might be germane...

In my recent online music teaching, I've used Zoom to run private lessons (I invite them, they set up their laptops w/camera so I can see hands, keyboard, and faces. We share music (the one not-immediately-obvious problem) either by a) my having a copy of the physical music they are playing from, or b) their making a photo or screenshot of their music and sending it to me; I then pull it up and have it showing on the side, (or on my phone) so I can see both it and them (to watch for hand positions, tension in the shoulders, etc.).

Occasionally, for dictation, they'll hold up their paper so I can see what they've written; sometimes it's hilarious if they don't hold it still, etc. I don't know of a way someone teaching within a CMS could do those things, if it were required within, say, a Music Ed. or BFA/MFA program.

For theory classes, there might be more uses: right now I have a series of Ppts that run about three weeks to a packet (I'm adapting these from a projected pub. that was in process when things shifted; I remain surprised at how well it's working...). I put those up via screen-sharing, do a live 1-hr. talk through with Q/A running throughout.

There are only 4-5 students at a time, but they're all attending faithfully and sending in homework as requested (I post these as "quiz questions" within the Ppt pages, highlit in yellow, to which they reply.)

I'm wrapping up the 3rd unit and starting the 4th now, with an assigned 16-m. composition coming up, to tie off the first series (we'll have run 9 weeks so far, with 3 to go).

The Ppts are sent out once we've finished a set, and I've cleaned up any errors; that's something that could be housed in a CMS setup, although my experience using those a few years back in teaching French, was that they were very rarely consulted.

With such a small group, in-class discussion is fine; with a larger group, I'd consider discussion boards, but again, their use in French class--even with prompts, points for posting, time frames, etc.,--were abysmal (but those were within the context of a f2f class so maybe it seemed over the top.)

So, my two thoughts are:

1) Does one really need a CMS setup to do effective online teaching, or does it just get in the way? (I felt my time doing setup in French was, frankly wasted: we had good class interaction without it, and no-one used it that I could see--It made me plan more specifically for the syllabus, but I'd have done that going along, anyway). And no-one in the departmentvefer audited it that I could see, so...no value there, either!

I also found the uploading editor to be grievously mangled...trying to get a simple italic to work took forever (as in Constant contact, also horrible)...no smooth functions at all for basic input.

2) Is there something I'm missing/would I benefit by a CMS setup either in my present situation, or in ways I might, say, teach basic music history, French lit., theatre/dance history, or art history--that I'm not seeing?

I'm not expecting to be teaching actual courses through a college/university as an adjunct at present, but in assessing the options ongoing, I might.

(And if this derails this thread too much, say so, and I'll start a new one...)

M.

[irina42]

I think the biggest benefit of using a CMS for any course is that it's a centralized place that all students can access where they can follow their grade progress.  I use D2L for all of my courses, including F2F (both lower-level and upper-level seminar-y ones).  However, I also use it for a lot of stuff, even in F2F class; all my assessments (whether quizzes or written assignments) are done there.  (I didn't want to lose class days to in-class exams.)  I also use a lot of D2L's features, like announcements, discussion boards for Q&As and introductions, checklists for each unit, and assigned readings.

Speaking specifically for online courses, I think that the CMS is the best option, again for its centralization.  If all the work happens there, you don't need to worry about a lost email or something similar.  However, if the university (like ours) has an Office 365 subscription, having that centralized space in a Microsoft Teams site, or even a Google classroom site could work just as well (particularly depending on the course and level of student).

[polly_mer]

Agreed on the centralization.  I will also make a pitch for standardization.

It's getting old to have multiple projects and have to learn several platforms.

Right now, my schedule includes:

Zoom meetings to go through our Microsoft 360 joint document

WebEx meetings  to go through our joint Overleaf document

Mattermost, Confluence, Jira, Google docs, and email for ongoing discussions

Phone calls to plan what we do for a discontinuous project that cannot have any useful details discussed except in-person in very special ares when we are not allowed in the special areas for face-to-face meetings.

And that's on top of whether the Git repo to share the project code is on BitBucket, GitLab, GitHub, or a locally controlled solution for Python, C, C++, C#, Fortran, Perl, shell scripts, or other less common languages.

Oh, and then Skype with grandparents for personal interactions.

Oh, and some of the meetings can't be done on some computers so I'm currently sys admin at home for several platforms.

I don't envy students and multi-institution faculty trying to sort it all out.  A good portion of my professional life was already electronic and it's hard for me to keep track of what goes where using what credentials(VPN, definitely not VPN, portal/one-off log in, one click log in, green network, yellow network, this LAN, that LAN, password, one-time token sent where?) and what syntax/controls/syntax for this platform.

[polly_mer]

Not official training, yet possibly useful

https://er.educause.edu/articles/2017/1/ada-compliance-for-online-course-design

Additional tips for teaching online

https://www.reddit.com/r/Professors/comments/gp5peo/have_to_teach_online_in_the_fallhave_no_effing/