Some Final Thoughts
Online Faculty Development Course
It's Iterative
Online education is roughly two decades old. In the history of education that's a very short time. We are all pioneers in the process of learning how to teach online, and professors regularly discover new ways to do it.
If you get discouraged, recognize that just like classroom teaching, your practice gets better with experience, as you discover what works, what doesn't, and what evidence or just hunches to follow for planning next semester's course. (Later, we encounter Curtis Bonk's idea of "baby steps," or incremental, manageable improvement to our teaching.)
You Will Break the Rules
In this course, we present you some ways to get started in online teaching. But realize that if you teach for a long time online, you'll probably discover times and places where you sensibly deviate from these practices, to serve priorities peculiar to your discipline and course subject. You'll find your own ways to do things that are better for your class community: you and your students. On the road to mastery, we learn rules and best practices. But part of what mastery means is knowing when it's time to break the rules or allegedly "best practices."
Colleagues are the Best Source for Online Teaching
As much or more than any training, listening to colleagues who have taught online is the best way to pick up insights on online pedagogy. Ask friends and fellow professionals at Canisius, or in your field internationally, for insights on how folks are teaching online. You may not adopt every method or tool suggested by every peer, but in general colleagial support is the best resource.
You should also take a look around the .edu web for syllabi and commentary by faculty in your discipline.
Here, for example, is a syllabus by historian Dr. Katherine Hubler at Oregon State University. "Western Civilization" is one of the oldest, most commonly taught liberal arts courses in American higher education. Hubler adapted it to an all-online class, combining traditional and new activities, assessments, and media. She provides clear explanations of goals, expectations and procedures.
In the video to the right, she briefly describes her approach.
...and Get Feedback
You can get potentially valuable feedback from your students, by asking them to assess your course. Canisius conducts a campuswide course evaluation toward the end of each semester, that include special questions served to online and hybrid classes. (You can view a transcript of this evaluation here.)
That can provide you with semester-to-semester feedback, but you can also conduct your own surveys of students within the semester, for example, halfway through, or after each third of the course. These can be a quick set of multiple choice questions, or a reflective writing assignment, prompted by basic, open-ended questions: "what did you like the most/least?" or "what would you change?" You can ensure anonymity, and offer a small grade score incentive.
You many not be able to change a lot of things students reply with, and you can tell them that. But you may be able to change some things mid-semester, and doing so can result in better student performance.