Home-Grown at a SLAC: Online Teaching Professional Development

Wilson College, a small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, has been using its own home-grown online course to teach its faculty how to teach online since spring 2019. We chose to develop and teach the course ourselves because we wanted our faculty to have the same online student experience our students receive. A vendor-created and hosted course would not do that. One of the most important things an online teacher needs to do is be able to walk a mile in the shoes of their students. This online teaching course makes the faculty do that. They submit essays, participate in discussion boards, create videos using the same video-recording platform students use, and they even must complete a small group project using the same tools their students would use. In our course, our faculty learn best practices for online teaching while walking that online student mile. Walking that mile helps them with their own course design as well as putting them in a better position to support their students with the tools. With only one helpdesk technician and one educational technology specialist, we need our faculty to be that first line of support. Our course is teaching them to be a good online teacher as well as being that first line of support. The best part is, they don’t even realize that’s what’s happening! Come see the course, learn how it was developed, talk about the next steps for Wilson, as well as a good way to get started on your own home-grown course.