Beyond Workshops: Rethinking Online Faculty Development
In a recent TOPcast podcast conversation with Thomas Cavanagh and Kelvin Thompson, I had the opportunity to reflect on something I’ve spent my career building at SUNY: what it really takes to design, teach, and sustain high-quality online learning at scale.
(12/1 Episode 199: Pillar Panel #3: Faculty Professional Development in Online Ed)
What emerged wasn’t a list of best practices, it was a system. A set of interdependent forces that either work together… or fall apart.
It’s an Ecosystem.
We often talk about leadership vision, faculty professional development, and research as separate pillars.
They’re not.
They function as a single, interdependent ecosystem.
Leadership vision sets the direction and establishes the conditions necessary for success, through policy, resources, expectations, and institutional commitment. But vision alone doesn’t change practice. Online faculty professional development is the engine that translates that vision into action, helping online faculty design, teach, and continuously improve in ways that align with those goals. Research and evidence-driven practice, in turn, ensure that the entire system remains grounded in what works, measuring, testing, refining, and evolving approaches over time.
At SUNY, we learned early that online teaching is not intuitive. It is both pedagogical and technical, but our context led us to prioritize pedagogy and the role of instructional design. Designing an effective online course takes time, on average, about 120 hours, and requires intentionality, transparency, alignment, and a deep awareness of the learner experience. These are not skills most faculty were asked to develop in their graduate training. As Thom and Kelvin have noted, faculty were prepared to be scholars, not necessarily teachers. Online learning makes that gap visible. What is often implicit and ephemeral in face-to-face teaching becomes explicit and persistent online, through artifacts that can be examined, shared, and improved.
Over time, this ecosystem at SUNY didn’t just produce training programs, it evolved into a vibrant community of practice. Online faculty and instructional designers became collaborators in a shared effort to continuously improve online teaching and learning, contributing back to the system that supported them. Over time our community expanded to include distance learning directors, deans, department chairs, program directors, librarians, technologists, multimedia experts, student support staff, help desk professionals, etc., and then extended beyond our institutions to our friends, neighbors and colleagues beyond SUNY.
Research played a critical role in sustaining that work. We didn’t just apply frameworks like the Community of Inquiry framework, we tested and extended them at scale, working with hundreds of thousands of learners and faculty over decades. That work informed online course design practices, online faculty development approaches, and ultimately the creation of OSCQR (the SUNY Online Course Quality Review rubric and process). In parallel, colleagues like Michelle Pakansky-Brock advanced humanizing practices grounded in research on belonging, social presence, and equity.
When leadership, faculty development, and research are aligned and mutually reinforcing, institutions can achieve consistent, scalable, and meaningful results. When they are not, online education efforts tend to fragment, remaining isolated at the level of individual faculty or programs without the structure needed to sustain impact.
Why Most Online Faculty Development Fails (and What Actually Works)
Across decades and dozens of institutions, the same patterns emerge.
Some approaches consistently fall short. One-off workshops, for example, may respond to immediate needs or interests, but they rarely lead to sustained changes in online teaching practice. Faculty often leave these experiences feeling processed rather than supported, with little connection to a broader developmental pathway for online practitioners. Similarly, when online faculty development focuses primarily on tools, how to use a technology rather than why and when to use it, it misses the pedagogical foundation necessary for quality online teaching.
Another common challenge arises when online teaching is treated as an add-on rather than a core academic endeavor. In those contexts, professional development becomes performative or compliance-driven, rather than meaningful. Without a sense of community, online faculty can also experience isolation, lacking opportunities for dialogue, reflection, and shared learning and growth. And without online instructional design partnerships, faculty are often expected to develop expertise across pedagogy, technology, accessibility, and learning science on their own, an unrealistic and unsustainable expectation.
In contrast, the approaches that do work share several key characteristics:
✔️ What does work
- Cohort-based, scaffolded, practice-driven online faculty development
Faculty engage as online learners, apply evidence-based practices, design authentic course components, practice interaction, and receive feedback. - A clear, research-based quality framework
Shared frameworks, like the Community of Inquiry, Learner Self-Regulation and Self Efficacy, Social Constructivism, Learner Centeredness, Bloom’s, UDL, and OSCQR, provide entry points to a common language grounded in theory, not personal preference. - Peer mentoring and community building
Networks of fellows, mentors, reviewers, and ambassadors extend learning beyond any single experience. - Respect for faculty expertise + support for new skills
Faculty are engaged as partners in the process, not positioned as novices. - Time, compensation, recognition, and leadership support
The labor of course design and continuous improvement is acknowledged and supported.
Online faculty development succeeds when it is grounded in values rather than compliance, when faculty experience both agency and support, and when the work leads to greater efficiency, effectiveness, and satisfaction, for both instructors and learners. It also succeeds when faculty can see the impact of their efforts reflected in learner engagement and success.
Conversely, it tends to fail when faculty do not understand the purpose behind the work, when programs are fragmented or imposed without consultation, and when professional development is disconnected from recognition, online instructional design support, and research.
Timeless Principles in a Rapidly Changing Landscape
Despite AI, new modalities, and constant disruption, the fundamentals haven’t changed.
Good teaching is still good teaching.
1. Design for clarity and transparency
Alignment between online course objectives, content, activities, and assessment is the magic formula for an effective high quality online course design.
2. Center human connection
Belonging, inclusivity, presence, and trust are not “extras.” They are the foundation of online learner persistence and success.
3. Think like a designer. Teach like a facilitator
Online teaching is a practice. It is intentional, structured, and iterative.
4. Prioritize accessibility
Accessibility isn’t accommodation, it’s anticipatory design that benefits everyone.
5. Let research inform practice
Learning science, theory, and institutional data should guide decisions, not the latest tool.
These principles have guided SUNY since the SLN era, and they remain steady anchors in a rapidly shifting field.
Equity is the Purpose of the Ecosystem
If there is something often missing from conversations about online learning, it is not the addition of equity, it is a reframing with equity not an add-on, a module, or a parallel effort. It is the purpose of the entire ecosystem.
It lives within leadership decisions regarding policy, procedures, resources, and priorities. It shapes online faculty development through inclusive, culturally sustaining pedagogies. It is embedded in research questions, in how we define quality, and in how we measure success.
This means attending to learner belonging, transparency, representation, and the realities of the digital divide. It means recognizing the role of inclusive and culturally responsive teaching and designing digital learning environments that acknowledge the full human experience of learners.
This is where my work most strongly aligns with Michelle Pakansky-Brock’s, where humanizing practices and inclusive design are not adjacent to quality, but central to it.
Equity is not something we add to the system.
It is why the system exists.
AI, Epistemic Beliefs, and the Risk of Getting It Wrong—Fast
AI is the latest disruption, but also one of the most revealing.
The concern is not the technology itself. It is how quickly institutions may adopt it in the name of efficiency, without interrogating its implications.
AI is not neutral. It reflects the assumptions, cultural biases, and epistemologies of the systems that produce it.
If we treat AI as:
- A shortcut for teaching
- A replacement for interaction
- A proxy for faculty presence
- Or even a replacement for instructional designers
we risk amplifying the very inequities we have been trying to address for decades.
My dissertation work highlights that faculty bring their epistemic beliefs and assumptions into their teaching, beliefs about what counts as knowledge, how learning happens, and who gets to be a knower. AI now sits directly within that space. If we assume AI can design and/or deliver instruction without the relational, dialogic work of teaching, or if we reduce learning to information transmission and delivery, we fundamentally misunderstand what learning is.
Online learning is not just about content.
It is a human, social, meaning-making process.
AI can generate text. It forces us to rethink how we assess learning and knowing, especially in online learning environments. But it cannot build trust, demonstrate cultural awareness, affirm identity, or engage in the reciprocal relationships that support deep learning.
The risk is not AI itself.
It is losing sight of the humanity at the center of learning.
So Where Do We Go From Here?
Moving forward is not about adding more tools or yet another isolated topic-based workshop.
It is about strengthening the ecosystem, ensuring that online education is guided by leadership with a clear strategic vision for why the institution engages in online learning; that online faculty development is centered on effective, evidence-informed pedagogical practice that develops and evolves with the instructor as skills, content and, technology change; and that research continues to deepen our understanding of how people teach and learn well online, using data to measure meaningful outcomes, evaluate impact, and inform strategic and pedagogical decision-making.
Most importantly, it requires intentional alignment across these elements, with equity embedded throughout, because equity is not a feature of quality; it is the measure of it.
Let’s continue the conversation…
What’s one thing your institution is doing well, or struggling with, when it comes to aligning leadership, online faculty development, research, and equity in online teaching and learning?
I’d love to hear what you’re seeing.
If you are not familiar with OSCQR and interested in training or certifications, or if you might be interested in our Institutional Readiness program, contact me for a consultation.
AI in Education, Educational Leadership, emerging issues, equity, frameworks, Inclusive Teaching, Institutional Strategy, leadership, online faculty development, online learning, research