All Roads Lead to Online Teaching Excellence: An Alternative Route to Faculty Certification for Online Teaching

New faculty who arrive at the University of Central Florida are very likely to be asked to teach at least one online (“W”) or mixed-mode (“M”) course. Realizing that effective teaching in these digital formats requires additional skills and knowledge that go beyond the traditional face-to-face classroom, UCF requires faculty to be certified in online teaching. Faculty at UCF have two avenues to obtain certification to develop and teach online or mixed-mode courses: our online teaching certification course IDL6543 or our alternative track for experienced faculty new to UCF called Online Faculty Readiness Assessment (OFRA). This assessment recognizes a faculty member’s prior online teaching experience and ensures the incoming faculty has the skills and knowledge they need to be successful teaching online at UCF. This alternative approach directly contributes to UCF’s strategic plan (“UCF Strategic Plan,” 2017) by fast-tracking new faculty as certified online instructors (Strengthening Faculty) and increasing the number of online courses available to students (Increasing Student Access)

TOPkit: An Online Faculty Development Resource

Faculty preparation is a critical success factor for any program that involves online teaching and learning (Kane, Shaw, & Pang, 2016; Merillat & Scheibmeir, 2016; Parker, Maor, & Herrington, 2013). Although experts in their respective fields, faculty may not have studied online pedagogy or instructional design before stepping into the onsite or online classroom. While few educators would argue against offering faculty development, institutions grapple with limited funding and campus resources (e.g., limited space, scheduling constraints) for faculty training. To pool resources for this purpose, the State University System of Florida Board of Governors committed to sponsoring a program to develop an online toolkit and annual workshop to support faculty development efforts statewide. The result was The Teaching Online Preparation Toolkit (TOPkit), an open educational resource (website and two free, customizable online faculty development courses) that faculty developers anywhere can use. This article describes the online toolkit and specifically highlights the toolkit’s pair of sample courses that may be downloaded and customized

TOPkit Part II: Leveraging Open Educational Resources in Your Custom Faculty Development Program

In support of the State University System of Florida Board of Governors 2025 Strategic Plan for Online Education, a team of instructional designers at the University of Central Florida produced two sample courses that could easily be adopted by other institutions for their own faculty development. One course is structured as a 10-week facilitated course, and the “lite” version is modified as a 5-week fully online course that may be self-paced or facilitated. The two sample online faculty development courses based on UCF’s award winning IDL6543 are downloadable as an IMS common cartridge that can be imported into an LMS and customized to meet the needs of individual institutions. These courses are a distillation of the key elements of IDL6543 that institutions may use—as is, or modified—to train their own faculty. The content is of the same high quality that UCF has used to train its own faculty. Topics include, but are not limited to, the following: Accessibility & Universal Design for Learning; Open Educational Resources; Interaction, Collaboration & Group Work Strategies; Online Assessments & Assessment Tools; Managing Academic Integrity & Honesty in the Online Environment; LMS Training; Campus Resources; Web Vet Strategies; Online Teaching Persona; FERPA & Copyright; Library Services; Bloom’s Taxonomy & Course Objectives; Group, Collaboration, and Conferencing Tools; Online Classroom Dynamics; Content Delivery and Logistics, and Emerging Technology. This session is intended for anyone interested in driving excellence by building a faculty development course from the ground up or significantly updating their existing professional development offering. We will provide a tour of the two sample courses, discuss the differences, and offer next steps to take advantage of these open resources