by Thom Freeman, Michelle Jarvie-Eggart, Janet Staker Woerner, Mary Benjamin, and Luis Fernandez-Arcay
Michigan Tech began incentivizing their teachers to learn current best practices for teaching online in 2017 through a stipend offered to take ED5101 – Foundations of Online Teaching. In the 2018/2019 academic year their Faculty Senate voted to require all online instructors to be trained in current best practices of online teaching to be able to teach fully online courses. With the onset of the pandemic in Spring 2020 all faculty were informed that the University’s Senate Policy requiring online teacher certification would be enforced for Fall 2020. This resulted in virtually all Michigan Tech’s online teachers completing online teacher training by Fall 2020.
Given this unique situation, we wanted to investigate if having all these teachers complete that training had affected their university teaching overall. Comments from surveying previous ED5101 students revealed a common thread of them reporting that taking that class would improve all their teaching, not just their online teaching.
We sent a survey to those teachers who completed online teaching training from 2019 through 2021 to determine how the training changed their approach to the design of a course, a lesson, and their teaching in general. Results of this survey will be shown in this research session.
Janet Staker Woerner, Ph.D.
Program Manager, Instructional Development & Innovation
Instructor: Delta Program and First -Year Experience
Center for Teaching, Learning, and Mentoring
Division for Teaching and Learning, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Michelle Jarvie-Eggart, Ph.D, P.E.
Assistant Professor, Engineering Fundamentals
Affiliated Faculty Cognitive and Learning Sciences
Affiliated Faculty Civil, Environmental, and Geospatial Engineering
Michigan Technological University
Thom Freeman
MA – Education, The George Washington University
Sr. Instructional Designer, Online Learning Specialist
William G. Jackson Center for Teaching and Learning
Adjunct Instructor: Cognitive Learning and Sciences Department
MTU Quality Matters Coordinator
Michigan Technological University
Mary Benjamin
PhD Student
Dept. of Civil, Environmental, & Geospatial Engineering
Michigan Technological University
Luis Fernandez-Arcay
Undergrad Assistant Researcher
Psychology Student
Grand Valley State University