The Impact of Administrative Decisions on Online Education: A Three-Part Series
Welcome to our series exploring the crucial role administrative decisions play in shaping the online learning environment. This collection of articles delves into the experiences of students, faculty, and administrators to provide actionable strategies for improving online education. Let’s begin by focusing on the faculty experience.
Faculty members are central to the success of any academic institution, particularly in online programs. They must balance teaching responsibilities with institutional goals while fostering meaningful student interactions. Administrators, such as deans and program coordinators, play a pivotal role in supporting faculty and ensuring their success.
The quality of the student experience is often tied to the support and resources provided to faculty. Therefore, properly supporting online faculty members as they develop and facilitate curriculum is crucial to the success of any online initiative. Here’s how administrators can create a supportive framework for faculty development and engagement:
Clear Guidance and Procedures
An institution should always communicate its vision for its online programs to the faculty members involved in developing and facilitating online courses. The following are steps administrators can take to support faculty members appropriately:
- Create and document broad level expectations regarding online development and facilitation.
- Create unified policies about what instructors can and cannot edit in live term shells.
- Create an online-specific intellectual property policy for all course writers that ensures long-term viability of online courses.
- Create professional guidelines for meeting copyright, Americans With Disabilities Act, and Section 508 standards.
- Create professional standards for course design and facilitation.
- Incorporate all of the above into a comprehensive online faculty handbook that is regularly updated.
Similar to how students should be set up for success in their online endeavors, faculty members should also be given the resources, guidelines, and infrastructure they need to effectively build and/or teach their online courses.
Incentives and Workload
Ensuring that faculty members are aligned with institutional policies is just as important as creating them. With online courses in particular, institutions have the opportunity to create a uniform experience, outlining workload, expectations, and policies.
- Establish clear expectations for course development and teaching loads.
- Offer compensation and recognition for the extra work required to develop and maintain online courses.
- Require faculty to review key policies to ensure alignment with institutional goals.
As with any workplace, transparency regarding compensation and expectations is key. This helps ensure that the faculty members creating and teaching these courses are aware of the institution’s expectations, can manage their time, and know how they’ll be compensated for their work.
Curriculum Consistency
For students, the more consistent their experience, the better the experience. Establishing a unified vision of what online courses should look and feel like to students and then implementing that vision in all online courses will have a significant impact on student achievement and confidence over the course of a program. Consider the following infrastructure elements:
- Implement standardized templates for syllabi, rubrics, and course layouts.
- Ensure consistent branding and course structure to enhance the student experience and reduce the administrative burden on faculty.
- Leverage content templates to assist faculty members in writing and organizing content so it integrates with the above practices.
By deciding on these consistent elements and making them part of the course design and delivery process, administrators will help ensure that students have an equitable experience from course to course.
Fostering Ownership and Engagement
Including department leaders and faculty members in the development of the online initiative should be a priority. Administrators should give faculty members every opportunity to have a constructive voice in defining their programs’ strategies and fostering a culture that values robust and effective online instruction. Here are some strategies to help with faculty engagement:
- Involve faculty in decision-making related to online programs.
- Encourage collaborative development of course content and strategies.
- Create peer review processes to build a culture of accountability and excellence.
Creating this type of infrastructure will help increase faculty buy-in, which will then ideally increase their engagement in the course design and delivery processes. Because faculty members are the ones who will ultimately serve as the face of the institution.
Professional Development
Online education is constantly changing, so institutions should make it a priority to provide faculty members with regular access to professional development opportunities in their fields. The following steps should be considered:
- Collect a wide range of evidence and metrics for planning professional development
- Offer regular training on best practices in online education.
- Provide opportunities for faculty to stay current with industry trends and tools.
- Integrate professional development into workload expectations to prioritize ongoing learning.
- Use a tailored evaluation tool beyond student survey data to measure the quality of online course facilitation.
By keeping faculty members up to date on the latest updates in the field, you ensure that the students enrolled in your courses are receiving an education that aligns with industry trends and best practices.
Conclusion
As the face of an institution’s online endeavors, faculty members play a critical role in the success of any program. By prioritizing these steps, administrators can help faculty deliver high-quality, engaging courses that align with institutional goals while fostering professional growth.
For more information on how academic administrators can positively impact the online classroom experience, explore the other articles available in this series:
