Improving Professional Development for Teaching Online

Abstract —It is believed that faculty in higher education should go through professional development programs before they begin to teach online. This paper reports evaluation data from an online faculty training course at a southeastern university in the U.S. to illustrate key elements of a high-quality web training program and the educators ’ learning experience. Recommendations are posited to revise the course design to remove the barriers of professional development and better facilitate mastery of necessary knowledge and skills in an online environment. Index Terms — professional development, online learning, online teaching, survey. 1 I