Faculty Ambivalence of Online Education: An Organizational Change Perspective

Abstract is available to download

Profiles in Community-Engaged Learning

To provide a snapshot of the many impressive manifestations of community-engaged learning at the University of San Francisco, a 2014-2015 Faculty Learning Community (FLC), supported by the Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE), has collected the following profiles of selected faculty members across all the schools and colleges. This report was prepared by members of the CTE’s Faculty Learning Community on Community-Engaged Learning: Kevin D. Lo, Facilitator (School of Management), Emma Fuentes (School of Education), David Holler (College of Arts and Sciences), Tim Iglesias (School of Law), Susan Roberta Katz (School of Education), Star Moore (Leo T. McCarthy Center for Public Service and the Common Good), Chenit Ong-Flaherty (School of Nursing and Health Professions), Jennifer Parlamis (School of Management) Susan Pauly-O’Neill (School of Nursing and Health Professions). Our intent with this report is to offer USF administrators and incoming faculty members a sense of what’s being done well in community-engaged learning (CEL), while also pointing out what challenges remain as we establish our identity as a university that prioritizes community engagement. (Incidentally, we prefer the term “community-engaged learning” to “service-learning,” which we feel more precisely defines the scope of our activities. For more about this designation, please see the Executive Report on Community Engaged Learning issued by this same committee in June 2015.) Community-engaged learning as defined by Eyler and Giles is “a form of experiential education where learning occurs through a cycle of action and reflection as students . . . seek to achieve real objectives for the community and deeper understanding and skills for themselves. In the process, students link personal and social development with academic and cognitive development . . . experience enhances understanding; understanding leads to more effective action.” (qtd. in Bandy, Vanderbilt Center for Teaching, “What Is Service Learning or Community Engagement?”). We invited at least two faculty members from each school/college to answer several questions about the application of CEL in their courses. After providing a brief overview of activities in each course, we asked each professor what works well and what challenges persist. The successes and the challenges, as you’ll see, vary widely, and yet they clearly delineate, limited though our present sample size is, the great variety and energy and commitment our faculty have demonstrated in working with community partners and students. It is our hope that this report is merely the beginning of a much more ambitious project to be taken up by the McCarthy Center which will provide many more profiles of professors in the months and years to come

Teaching Negotiations in the New Millennium: Evidence-Based Recommendations for Online Course Delivery

Traditional methods for teaching negotiation have required both instructor and student to be physically present in the same location. With the advent of the Internet and associated technological advances, however, instructors may now transcend geographical barriers and effectively deliver the same content virtually. In this article, we present an exploratory study comparing two masters-level negotiation courses: one taught using a traditional in-person method and the other taught online. Results showed no significant difference in knowledge acquisition as quantified by objective measures, including mean grades. In addition, self-report data indicate that, although students\u27 skill and mastery of negotiation improved in both courses, online students reported that they experienced less interaction and social engagement with their classmates and instructor. Several course development strategies and best practices are discussed

How Will We Work Together? Synthesizing a Cross-Cultural Collaboration Grid from the Dual Concern Model and Acculturation Framework

Cross-cultural collaboration through multicultural groups and teams is the current reality of international business. However, management research does not specifically address the process by which individuals from different national cultures come together to collaborate in an organizational work setting. This work takes a step towards understanding this process. We first discuss the dual concerns model and the acculturation framework to identify areas of congruence that have explanatory value for cross-cultural collaboration. From this point, we derive a cross-cultural collaboration grid that can help understand how people from different national cultures might work together based on the relative prioritization of concern for self vs. concern for the other. After introducing the cross-cultural collaboration grid, we discuss potential moderating variables at both the individual (contact, superordinate goals, and power) and cultural levels (individualism-collectivism, tightness-looseness, and power distance) that will impact the cross-cultural collaboration process. We conclude with contributions and limitations that can be addressed by future research

Looking Back to Leap Forward: The Potential for E-Mediation at Work

In this chapter, we provide an overview of the broad field of Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) so that we can set the stage for a more nuanced discussion of how e-mediation might contribute to dispute resolution mechanisms in the workplace. We discuss the context in which e-mediation has developed and grown, and consider non e-commerce uses for e-mediation such as the use of e-mediation in workplace conflicts. The primary aims of this chapter are (a) providing an overview of the ODR field and (b) provoking new and promising areas of expansion for e-mediation generally and in the workplace specifically. We propose several research avenues as well as suggestions for the application of e-mediation to online and on-ground workplace disputes based on relevant research. It is our hope that this chapter encourages further exploration and experimentation in the field of e-mediation at work

Overcoming Faculty Avoidance of Online Education: From Resistance to Support to Active Participation

The online delivery of higher education courses and programs continues to expand across academic disciplines at colleges and universities. This expansion of online education has been precipitated by, among other things, (a) the rise in personal computer ownership, (b) the ease of access to the Internet, (c) the availability and continuous improvement in technology for the delivery of online courses, and (d) the increase in demand for online courses by both traditional and nontraditional students. However, the proliferation of online education has not been enthusiastically supported by all constituents of higher education. Specifically, some faculty members remain resistant to the shift to online course delivery. This article applies the Transtheoretical Model of Change to the process of gaining faculty support for, and involvement in, online learning. After briefly reviewing current issues in online education and making a case for its adoption, we describe sources of faculty resistance and offer recommendations for interventions that may be applied to transforming faculty resistance to support and eventually to active participation

Teaching Negotiation Online Part 1: Challenges and Opportunities

Higher education is in the midst of a rapid evolution, as technology offers enhanced possibilities for education in the classroom and from a distance. In this article, and in a second installment to be published in the next issue of SIGNAL, we discuss online teaching broadly and how it applies to teaching negotiation specifically