Faculty Development Practices in Distance Education for Success with Culturally Diverse Students

The student population is becoming more geographically and culturally diverse in the online arena because students from all parts of the world are able to register for online classes. These diverse students need competent and qualified online facilitators that are able to use diverse teaching pedagogies to meet their learning needs. Therefore, developing and training faculty members through a successful orientation program to integrate diverse cyberspace technology into the classroom for student learning are a necessity today. As such, administrators should focus on the effective development, training, and retaining of technologically savvy educators to teach in various distance learning modalities (online, on-ground, and blended formats) using cyberspace technology while focusing on effectively achieving learning outcomes with diverse students. The document discusses diversity issues, the desires and views of online students based on a survey of 229 graduate students, and suggestions for new online faculty members. An emersion model of training used for faculty orientation and development is presented