Faculty Resources

The coronavirus has colleges and universities swinging into action to move courses online. In the coming weeks, we’ll find out just how prepared (or not) academe is to do this on a large scale. Those of us in online teaching and educational technology have moved quickly to help, too, and it’s astonishing how many helpful resources have already been pulled together.

It turns out online teaching and learning aren't inherently better or worse than the face-to-face variety — just different.

Managing the online classroom presents new challenges for faculty members. New online faculty members can become confused with the process of teaching and creating content online due to a lack of support and ignorance of tools and strategies. Issues often arise in online teaching due to the ubiquity of the online classroom and finding appropriate tools to help transfer face-to-face strategies to the digital classroom. By integrating both digital tools and personnel support, faculty can flourish in the online environment.

Inside Digital Learning asked four authors of books about online education for their expert advice on how instructors and their institutions can excel in virtual course instruction. The authors agreed that the online classroom is different enough from the traditional one that faculty members and adjuncts need to create courses for digital delivery that are substantially different from those they teach on campus. And they said teaching online requires an even keener focus on student engagement than the face-to-face model does.

The development of educational technology has provided platforms for undergraduate music courses to take place in an online environment. While technology is available, this does not mean that all teaching staff are ready for the pedagogical change required to implement teaching online. A transformation of pedagogical practice (that is, to online pedagogy) is required for teaching courses online. Researchers suggest that the use of social-constructivist learning and collaborative online learning models strongly support online student learning. The following case study explores how teaching staff in an American university music department (N = 7) transformed their pedagogy when teaching undergraduate music courses online. The study highlights the diversity of perceptions about teaching music online, and the influence of these perceptions on the pedagogical approaches and strategies used when teaching and developing an online music course. The pedagogical elements of teaching music online were found to have connections with the community of inquiry framework's nexus of teaching presence, cognitive presence and social presence, and suggested a social-constructivist course design. Finally, the findings show that teaching staff experienced a shift of pedagogical approach when transitioning to teaching music online. Implications include assisting music faculty in the adoption of pedagogical approaches and that they should be addressed at individual, departmental and institutional levels.

The Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) Consortium for Online Humanities Instruction was launched in 2014 with a series of specific questions about the quality, effectiveness, and efficiency of online teaching and learning. As this report documents, many but not all of the questions were answered during the course of the project. Students and faculty members from 42 independent colleges and universities benefited directly from the project. CIC hopes that other independent colleges and universities will take heart from their successes, will appreciate the challenges the Consortia members faced (and usually overcame), and will apply the lessons learned to their own campuses. This report offers good advice for institutions that are new to online instruction in the liberal arts as well as institutions with significant experience in the area.