Charina Ong
The Centre for Development of Teaching and Learning (CDTL), the professional development arm of the National University of Singapore (NUS), exists to “advance cutting-edge, evidence-based, impactful teaching and learning practices in ways that support the educational vision of NUS”. Consistent with CDTL’s mission, this study investigates the potential of fully online professional development workshops to support engaging, meaningful professional development for academics, while accommodating their needs for convenience and flexibility – given the advances in learning technologies and platforms and latest research on effective online pedagogies.
This study will: (1) examine academics’ ratings and qualitative feedback of the existing “Developing e-Learning Resources Using Camtasia Studio” workshop; (2) redesign the workshop to a fully online version based on academics’ feedback of the existing face-to-face session and current research on fully online professional development; (3) examine academics’ ratings and feedback of the fully online “Developing e-Learning Resources Using Camtasia Studio” workshop; and (4) discuss implications for use in future online professional development offerings.
Academics’ feedback will be collected via a pre and post-survey using the COI survey instrument and an adapted COI survey instrument respectively. Results will discuss pre and post COI survey results, academics’ suggestions to further refine the online workshop, and fully online workshop feedback results compared to previous face-to-face workshop results.
The findings of this study may encourage other academic developers to explore alternative models and formats for conducting faculty professional development workshops and courses, as well as provide an opportunity to contribute to research on emerging best practices for fully online courses.
The research questions of this study are:
- What key factor/s are important to academics in a fully online professional development workshop?
- How can the online workshop (prototype) be further refined based on the academics’ feedback?
- How can we apply insights from this study to future online professional development offerings?
