Transforming online curricula, transforming staff

Abstract

Developing online teaching skills can occur through involvement in learn-by-doing strategies, which incorporate informal, organic or needs-driven strategies. Such processes are sometimes labelled as “bottom-up” staff development processes. In other contexts, teaching staff are formally directed to develop online teaching skills through a series of compulsory staff development workshops or courses. These approaches typically include “top-down” staff development processes. This poster describes how a group of tertiary teaching staff extended their on-campus and distance teaching repertoire of skills to include online teaching skills. In this case, the process of staff development began with collecting data about the concerns and practices of the teaching staff involved. An analysis of the data informed the development of a “middle-out” staff development strategy which comprised a mixture of informal and formal strategies, and acknowledged the ethos of the institution and the specific needs of the staff involved. This professional development program incorporated a group of nine informal and formal strategies. The poster presents an analysis of the data that were gathered during this project alongside the professional development strategies that were developed as a result of this analysis.