Introduction

As the project began, it became clear that the many members of the faculty would benefit from the information that the team members were learning, but would have neither the time nor the resources to take the similar training. The question became, once we learned what we knew, how should we train our fellow faculty members in these subjects? Discussions relating to intense workshops, focused professional development meetings, and other methods all came to the same conclusion: our overworked faculty would simply not have the time to sit down as a group and learn this material.

The solution was to find a method to teach these classes individually, repeatedly, and on-demand. The only acceptable option was to teach using online methodology.

Training

The University of California, San Diego, offers an online program to learn online teaching, which is not as much of a tautology as it seems.

This program provided a solid foundation of theoretical tools combined with practical applications that set the stage for the next phase of our mission: online classes that our students and faculty can access from school or home (or anywhere else) that will teach them the skills they need to handle online learning, whether as a consumer of educational material, or a provider.

Hands-on training and implementation of sample courses will be available in Fall 2012

Online classes

Courses that can be taught as wholly online, or as blended classes (online and face-to-face) are in the planning stages for deployment as soon as sufficient faculty training has taken place. Some of the classes envisioned for the online environment include:

• Health
• Physics
• Chemistry
• Life Skills
• Study Skills