Empowering faculty in online teaching
At 2U, my team prepared asynchronous content for online course development. University faculty would submit lecture slides to be formatted and copy edited for their online courses. Creating lecture slides for an entire course that professors may not have taught before, let alone online, is a big task. Submitting them on time became a recurring issue in course development.
Implications
Delayed course development
Sacrificed quality and student outcomes
Increased costs
Partnering with the Faculty Enrichment and Development Team, I developed and delivered 45-min live and recorded Zoom workshops to demonstrate best practices in lecture slide design for online learning. Through a voluntary and interactive workshop, we aimed to tackle the problem indirectly and supportively.
The audience was a group of seasoned academics who know how to teach. We weren’t there to tell them how. Our goal was to pad their existing expertise with the specific principles and best practices for online learning. Connecting our recommendations to learning science helped us convince them of that.
Learning design
45 minutes is not a lot of time. The most effective way to transfer knowledge with limited time is to demonstrate. I built in visual examples of a well-designed slide deck to illustrate a comprehensive sequence, and zoomed in to analyze the anatomy of a slide optimized for online learning.
Show and tell
So much of our online experience is visual. It’s important to be intentional about what the learners see. Simple, modern, and content-appropriate imagery elevates a learning experience. Recurring graphics help learners quickly connect concepts. But when visual learning is not possible, well-written instructional description is key.
Digital is visual
Learning by doing is tried and true, so I created a shared interactive practice environment with an Activity Google Slides deck. I drafted slide examples that faculty members, in groups, could edit based on best practices just learned. At the end of the deck, they could find examples of recommended edits for future reference.
