Jamestown Community College recognizes the importance of providing faculty the support they need to be effective educators. With the increasing number of courses at JCC being offered in distance education formats, we want to ensure faculty have the support they need to effectively design and teach these courses. We also want to ensure that all JCC faculty have supports in place and the training needed should they suddenly find themselves shifting to remote instruction.
The Teaching Students at a Distance course is a three-week online asynchronous course in Brightspace that consists of three content modules, A Successful Start, Instructor-Student and Student-Student Interactions, and Student-Content Interactions.
The "A Successful Start" module provides faculty with getting started information for anyone teaching distance education courses, including best practices, syllabi requirements, course templates, and an introduction to OSCQR. In this module, faculty complete an assignment identifying ways their course meets OSCQR Standard 1, ideas for improvement, and suggestions for future training on this topic. Faculty also participate in a class discussion where they share ideas on ways to reduce barriers for students trying to navigate multiple online courses and learning new technologies/tools.
The "Instructor-Student and Student-Student Interactions" module discusses regular and substantive interaction and how to use Brightspace tools to engage students with the instructor and other students. Emphasis is placed on creative ways to use course announcements, class discussions, and grading feedback to establish and maintain these connections. Intervention tools (Starfish and Intelligent Agents) are also discussed. Faculty complete a course communication plan for one week of their course that includes the announcements, discussion facilitation, virtual office hours, and grading feedback for the week as well as any other plans the instructor has for instructor-student interactions. This module also includes a "Discussion on Discussions" where faculty develop and share a discussion prompt for their course and colleagues provide feedback.
The "Student-Content Interactions" module is an introduction to online course design (JCC offers a much more robust Online Course Design training for developers of online courses). This module introduces backward design, content chunking, active learning strategies, and accessibility standards. Faculty complete an assignment where they run the Ally Accessibility Report for their course, analyze the results, and choose one item to remediate. They also share ideas for active learning in the module discussion.
Discussions in this course are facilitated and feedback is provided on each assignment submission. A variety of Brightspace tools are used when facilitating this course, including video feedback and badging, so faculty get to experience them in action from the student side. While the content of this course is important, it is the sharing of ideas among faculty, the connection of faculty to the Online Learning team, and the experience of taking an online course in Brightspace as a student that makes this course a powerful professional development tool.
This course is a part of onboarding for all new full-time and adjunct faculty and all current faculty are expected to complete the course by May 2025. Over 150 faculty members have completed it!

At the end of the course, faculty fill out a course evaluation. The results have been overwhelmingly positive. The two most common comments are that they appreciate the sharing of ideas among colleagues and that they learned much from experiencing the course as a student. Over 150 faculty have completed the course!

This course is provided in Brightspace without any external tools. Participants need access to a computer.
There are not any outright costs. It does take a considerable amount of time to facilitate the course, so staff time needs to be accounted for.