MOOCS, eLearning, online learning, and blended/hybrid are buzzwords that have been intensifying around the Dalhousie campus over the last couple of years. Rather than making decisions based solely on general trends, such as those found in the ECAR study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology (2013) and Inside Higher Ed’s Survey of Faculty Attitudes on Technology (2013), or on our anecdotal experiences of our own university community, we wanted to make context-informed decisions about our professional development programming choices for faculty to ensure best fit. This is especially the case as Dalhousie is at a pivotal point in its history – with a new President who has just conducted a 100 days of Listening visioning exercise that highlights eLearning as an important direction for our institution. The recent amalgamation of instructional design staff into the Centre for Learning and Teaching (CLT) also provided an opportunity for envisioning CLT development work in this area.
CLT staff believed this was an opportune moment to ask questions about the use of technology in learning and teaching on campus and in the virtual classroom (eLearning). This presentation will focus on a university-wide survey that CLT developed for delivery to Dalhousie students and faculty in the spring of 2013. Our analysis gave us a wealth of data that has helped the Centre shape faculty and graduate student programming with respect to online learning and classroom technology, allowing us to take an informed approach to creating a roadmap for developing interest in online learning and teaching in our community over the next few years.
By focusing on a transitional approach to faculty development in our traditional university environment, we believe that we can gradually transform attitudes and approaches to online learning, and support development of online and blended courses to complement and expand thinking about classroom learning. Administrators and educational developers may find our survey results, approach to planning, and our ensuing faculty development programming choices useful in developing their own contextualized approach to faculty development planning.