Faculty Training and Development Practices in Distance Education to Achieve High Performance through Extraordinary Teaching

Developing and training faculty members to integrate cyberspace technology into the classroom for student learning is basically a necessity in today’s competitive world of education, but many educators fear or resist it due to lack of effective training. As such, administrators should focus on the effective development, training, and retaining of qualified educators to teach in various distance learning modalities (online, on-ground, and blended formats) using cyberspace technology while focusing on effectively achieving learning outcomes. An emersion model of training used for “training-the-trainers” in the corporate arena as well as for faculty development is presented for application and benchmarking. Personal experiences and best practices gleaned from different universities (business programs using cutting edge technologies) and corporate computer-based training are discussed. Also, best practices and suggestions for effective faculty compensation and teaching load in distance education are explored. Furthermore, administrators must ask for participation and interaction of experienced educators in order to glean and highlight their successes as well as challenges they face currently in serving the needs of diverse student populations in distance education. Both means and processes for effective faculty development and training in a just-in-time basis with least cost and expenditure should be implemented by the administration