“Developing online teaching websites for faculty: iterative improvements learned from Spring and Summer terms.”
Description
In our world of academia, we were thrown into the experience of an online hybrid semester, spring 2020, due to COVID-19. In this workshop, I will present ways we developed and use Parsons, First Year Online Faculty Guide to reshape courses, and inform faculty. I will describe activities and how we use the guide as a tool and model for online learning. I will share lessons learned from spring 2020, what we incorporated in the summer 2020 sessions and what will make online learning success in the fall.
Timetable
Presentation (20 minutes) Break into Discussion Groups (20 minutes) Report Back - Large Group Discussion (10-15 minutes) Summary by Presenter (5 minutes)
Interaction
To prepare attendees for the break out discussions on Zoom, I will pose three questions to compare different institutions' online faculty guidebooks. Attendees will break into groups of 3-5 people, depending on the number of participants. I will ask each group to assign one member to report back to the large group and give a 2-5 minute summary, depending on the number of break out groups and participants. Discussion questions:
- What has been your institution's experience with developing a faculty resource for online teaching: who participated, and how; what existing frameworks or resources were incorporated?
- What elements were revised most significantly during the iterative redesigns; what would you do differently?
- What successes or challenges did you experience in developing, revising, and redesigning your faculty resource?
Takeaway
The takeaway will be answers to how design schools at the conference have worked through struggles with structure, content, and platforms, and found solutions through course development with the assistance of their online faculty guides. If a design school has not developed an online guide, how do they support their faculty to develop online teaching tools and best practices? I will also gather strategies for creating community, digital tools, and making in other art and design college online courses. I hope to identify these strategies in First Year programs within the participating universities.
Outcomes
I plan to gather information from other participants and bring best practices back to our First Year leadership team to inform our course design process.
Abstract
Like most institutions, Parsons School of Design scrambled to move courses online during Spring 2020. Subsequently, many of us (including The Parsons First Year leadership and faculty) then devoted significant time and energy to developing processes, platforms, and content for the Summer term. In this workshop, we will solicit best practices and challenges from our peers: especially concerning the development of resources similar to our Parsons First Year Online Site, which details guidelines and tools to help faculty build online classes. Links to the site provide course templates with examples of developed courses, shared principles, teaching and learning webinars, and demos, to inspire syllabus development. This Parsons faculty resource has been created iteratively since its first prototype, with new tools and techniques continually added from contributions made by faculty submission to leadership. It is this iterative process of designing and developing similar resources that we would like to explore with our peers from other institutions.