Rolling With the Flow

COVID-19 created a paradigm shift in higher education (HE), speeding up a process that was already underway and forcing institutions and instructors to develop the competencies necessary to offer effective delivery and resources online. Student reflections on Spring 2020 suggested that institutions were not always successful in their transitions. Students saw gaps in crucial areas, including online instructor presence, social presence for instructors and peers, and instructor immediacy. The purpose of this chapter is to propose best practices for instructional practice and technology in the online virtual education space to increase student engagement, instructor immediacy, and online social presence. HE institutions must embrace or enhance a variety of techniques that will improve the student experience. HE continues its shift toward cutting-edge technology to scale, streamline, and improve student engagement and interaction while creating new ways of establishing instructor presence and immediacy.

Examining Higher Education Instructor Perceptions of Roles and Competencies in Online Teaching

Online instructors adopt various roles and perform various competencies in the design and delivery of online courses. In this study, online instructor roles are categorized into eight types including Subject Matter Expert, Course Designer and Developer, Course Facilitator, Course Manager, Advisor/Mentor, Assessor/Evaluator, Technology Expert, and Lifelong Learner. Through survey-based research with 141 online instructors, this study examines competencies that online instructors perform based on various roles. When rating competencies, overall categorical means for all the roles were rated above 4.00, which showed that they used all these roles. The highest rated items and lowest rated items are discussed in addition to the connection between research and practice in online teaching. Online instructors who participate in training and who collaborate with instructional designers rated the frequency with which they perform the competencies to be higher. This study has implications for online instructors, instructional designers, and administrators who design and deliver online learning and offer professional development for online instructors.

The Secret to being a Successful Online Instructor

The Secret to being a Successful Online Instructor

Tracing the Path Toward Self-Regulated Revision: An Interplay of Instructor Feedback, Peer Feedback, and Revision Goals

Building upon Zimmerman’s socio-cognitive view of self-regulation, we explored EFL (English as a Foreign Language) students’ revision and the likely contribution to revision from three salient self-regulating sources: peer feedback, instructor feedback, and revision goals. Data was obtained from 70 Chinese EFL students in a writing class through a 300-word online writing assignment involving online instructor and peer feedback, free-response revision goals, and a required revision. We closely coded students’ revision and then used the same coding scheme to analyze the relative levels of association of revision changes with peer comments, instructor comments and revision goals. We found that: (a) the majority of revision changes have been triggered by three mediating sources, with revision goals as the most significant contributing source. Additionally, most revision changes come from a combination of two or three sources, with the overlap of peer feedback and revision goals accounting for the biggest overlapping contribution for both high and low-level revisions; (b) as for the relationship among the three sources, no significant difference was found between revision goals’ overlap rate with peer feedback and their overlap rate with instructor feedback. Instructor feedback and peer feedback did not overlap very much. Findings suggest that students could revise beyond instructor and peer feedback in their revision efforts guided by their own reflective goals, and peer feedback could function as a more productive and multiple-reader source of revision in comparison with instructor feedback. This study also provided evidence for students’ self-regulated learning of writing through the use of self-regulating resources and charted a route for how writing could be improved.

Social Presence in an Online Learning Environment

Technology alone cannot create the sense of community that is needed for effective online learning. Participants in an online environment can perceive a sense of isolation when social connectedness is not created and encouraged. A community of inquiry emerges when online participants perceive that they are seen and heard and opportunities for active engagement with others is provided. This chapter provides guiding principles for an effective online experience and includes multiple suggestions from an experienced online instructor to create and maintain the social presence of all participants in any online learning experience.

Examining the Evolution of Key Characteristics in Faculty Mentoring Programs for Online Adjunct Faculty

Geo-separated adjunct faculty often experience isolation as a result of minimal contact with their institutions. This can have a negative impact on their success and that of their students. Leadership at Park University recognized these challenges and has been providing peer mentoring to online undergraduate faculty for two decades. The pioneer program paired new online faculty with experienced faculty who were paid a small stipend to provide technical assistance and guidance. The Online Instructor Evaluation System (OIES) was developed soon after. In 2007, the mentoring component expanded with the Online Instructor Mentoring Program (OIMP). This chapter explores the rich history of mentoring online faculty at Park and compares characteristics from the developmental stage of the OIMP and the current version of the OIMP as models for program design. Factors include discipline-specific mentoring, compensation, workload, access, ratios, professional development, a resource center, oversight, and a transformative mentoring community. Motivational incentives are also examined.

Applying Online Instructor Presence Amidst Changing Times

Online learning can be challenging for both the students and instructors. Students can feel isolated or intimidated by the asynchronous environment, and instructors may find it difficult to connect with students as well as encourage active learning and critical thinking. Instructor presence (IP), as presented by the community of inquiry model (CoI), suggests that there are three areas of presence that must be applied cohesively to create an environment that is satisfying to students and the instructor: teaching, social, and cognitive. In this chapter, the authors report their findings of applied IP on student pass rates, drop rates, and satisfaction after exposing online instructors to IP training that provided immediate application examples. The findings suggested that when IP is applied effectively, student outcomes are significantly improved and are sustainable. This chapter will also share specific strategies, based on this model, that were utilized in the authors' research protocol.

Online Instructor Development: A COOL story

This paper explores the development of a flexible, free, online certificate program built on open educational resources to support instructors transitioning to online and non-traditional teaching modes. The program offers multiple pathways to completion, including recognition of prior learning and immersing participants in the online learning environment. We describe the challenges learners had to overcome to engage in the program and how, in doing so, they were able to embrace constructivist and connectivist approaches. These, in turn, afforded them ongoing connections, broke the mold of preconceptions and myths when preparing to engage future online learners, and shaped their practice through exposure to learning theories and evidence-based practices. In this paper, we explore the initial design of the program through the lens of the program facilitators and learners from the first cohort, and share our collective learning and reflections from this process. Nous nous penchons ici sur l’élaboration d’un programme de certificat gratuit, souple et basé sur des ressources éducationnelles ouvertes. Offert en ligne, ce programme est conçu pour aider les professeurs à faire la transition vers l’enseignement en ligne et vers des méthodes d’enseignement non traditionnelles. Il existe de nombreuses manières de satisfaire aux exigences du programme, y compris la reconnaissance de l’apprentissage et de l’immersion dans un environnement d’apprentissage en ligne. Dans notre article, nous faisons état des difficultés auxquelles les apprenants ont été confrontés lors de leur participation au programme. Nous montrons comment, en surmontant ces obstacles, ils se sont approprié des approches constructivistes et connectées, lesquelles leur ont permis d’établir des connexions et de déconstruire certains mythes et préjugés au bénéfice des futurs apprenants en ligne, tout en les aidant à façonner leur pratique au moyen de théories de l’apprentissage et de pratiques fondées sur des données probantes. Notre étude examine la conception initiale du programme à partir du point de vue des animateurs et des apprenants de la première cohorte. Nous présentons également les réflexions et les leçons que nous avons tirées, collectivement, de cette expérience.