Binghamton University has a strong online presence in its Winter and Summer Session courses, in addition to some online courses in its fall and spring courses. Prior to 2014, Binghamton University had no full-time Instructional Designers on campus, so much of the development of online courses, and how to teach online, was up to the individual faculty member and/or their department. Our University Center for Training and Development does train faculty on the use of our Learning Management System (LMS), but never fully covers specific pedagogical topics and best practices.

In order to build the quality of our online learning courses, the Provost’s Office charged the Center for Learning and Teaching to develop a University-wide program. Participants in this program explore current research and practices regarding online learning, as well as related fundamental instructional design concepts and technologies. We currently run at least 25 full-time faculty and 50 graduate teaching assistants through each cohort. The program is led by the Instructional Designers in the Center for Learning and Teaching (CLT).

The program is delivered in a hybrid format; some of the material is in an online, self-paced format, while other content is in a face-to-face format. The face-to-face time commitment is 4 hours for the two seminars and at least 2 hours for face-to-face consultations. The rest of the program is delivered in an online format through Blackboard, so participants are given the experience of a student in an online course. Keep in mind that, even though the online material is self-paced, there are due dates to complete the modules.

Faculty also have the opportunity to experience Binghamton University’s award-winning Online Learning Immersion Experience course (B-ONLINE). This Blackboard course is a self-paced orientation to online learning and many of our students elect to take this orientation prior to working in their online course; some students take this orientation even before they register for an online course, just to get the feel of online learning. Many faculty also take this orientation to understand the online student perspective, in addition to experiencing one model of online course development. In 2014, the National Association of Summer Session awarded the B-ONLINE project its Innovation Award for its creativity in preparing students for online learning while also acting as a faculty development tool.

One of the more powerful aspects of our Teaching Online Certification Program involves the one-to-one consultations with faculty. After most of our content has been imparted to faculty, we then consult with participants individually so that we can answer specific questions and challenges per faculty, per discipline. Many participants in our first cohort indicated that this portion of the program was very valuable.

We have customized the OSCQR rubric to meet our specific needs at Binghamton University. Participants in the program are introduced to this rubric early on and for our second cohort, we have customized the rubric to include some language tweaks as well as essential/important designations for program completion requirements. We have found the OSCQR rubric to be crucial to our work in the program. We use it for the Instructional Design Review, Accessibility Review, Instructor Self-Review as well as program tracking capabilities.

I have shared some other resources in this application that provide more detail on our program, specifically the program requirements document that we share with faculty at the start of the program.

Our Teaching Online Certification Program is, primarily, a process rather than just one tool/solution. We developed our own content for our hybrid model and deliver it through a Blackboard Organization, which could be shared with others. Other portions of our process can be shared in part or in full, depending upon the goals of those requesting access/use.

Much has been written about on the value of faculty development and training for online course development. For instance, Penn State recently released a study on the value and effectiveness of their online course development program: http://bit.ly/1XgnhKj. Anecdotally, we have seen our first cohort of participants benefitting immensely from their successful completion of the program, not only in their online teaching, but also in their face-to-face teaching environments. We are now in our second cohort of participants and will soon be conducting more formal research on the effectiveness of our program.