12046

12046

General Session - Conference Presentation and Interactive Activity Only (40 minutes, no formal paper)

Holly McCracken, Capella University, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, holly.mccracken@capella.edu Dittmar Eileen, Capella University, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, eileen.dittmar@capella.edu
 * Promoting Continuous Quality in Online Teaching Implementing A Comprehensive Faculty Development Program**

While faculty development programs are essential to providing guidance, support, and advisement to campus-based faculty members, they are particularly critical to consistently engaging and training large geographically dispersed faculties teaching one hundred percent online. Experienced e-learning faculty members share strategies for implementing a comprehensive faculty development program essential to the continued quality improvement of teaching skills and abilities. The faculty development program of focus in this article is a departmental-specific effort to foster and sustain quality, referred to as the “META Model”.

The program evolved from the need to design, implement, and update an engaging yet rigorous training program to enable self-assessment and reinforce continuous quality improvement. The high-impact META model (centered around Mentoring, Engagement, Technology integration, and Assessment activities) promotes information sharing, facilitates content creation, and fosters collaboration and affiliation among such faculty groups teaching one hundred percent online; its ongoing use results in increased student satisfaction and instructional quality.

Model components include customized individual mentoring, the integration of emerging technologies that reinforce ongoing communication and interaction, and ongoing assessment measures all of which emphasize continuous professional engagement and development. As indicated by term-based data analytics, the application of the META model both aids in the development of professional communities that produce high performing online faculty, as well as holds implications for potential impact to the larger field of faculty training and evaluation for those teaching in wholly online learning environments.

//Interactivity// Presenters will incorporate the following techniques as means to engage participants: 1. Using polls to indicate participant interest, experiences, and ideas. 2. Sharing actual tools used in the faculty development program (e.g., the exemplary faculty rubric or the course review worksheet). 3. Generating discussion by soliciting responses to key questions used to further the goals of the presentation. 4. Facilitating a question/answer period following the presentation.

All Audiences faculty development, training, performance improvement