2016 Annual Conference

With academic institutions increasing online education offerings, faculty may often be encouraged to create online courses that parallel, or replace, traditionally-delivered face-to-face courses. Where and how can faculty find instructional support in these situations, and what questions are the most useful as we design courses for a different delivery method?

The audience for this roundtable discussion will include teachers, trainers, and learning facilitators who have, are presently engaged in, or will be required to deliver online courses that have traditionally been delivered face-to-face. In addition, instructional staff who work with learning facilitators to accomplish such a conversion should attend to exchange ideas and expertise with others in attendance. In the presenter’s experience, those staff members are part of an office of Instructional Consulting, graduate students who work closely with faculty to design and deliver effective online instruction.

Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) began delivering Adult Education master’s courses online in 1998. The Master’s of Adult Education was a program in the School of Continuing Studies, which closed in 2012; the Adult Education program was moved from Indianapolis to the Bloomington campus. Across the entire history of the Adult Education program at Indiana University, one course (Participation Training) has continued to be delivered in a face-to-face format. IU’s Office of Online Learning reports that “26.5% of IU students opt for online classes. The university now offers 104 academic certificates and degrees online. These enrollments account for 10.3 percent of the total IU credit hours taken” (http://online.iu.edu/about/news/160210-articles/spr2016_enrollments.php). As full-time faculty in an online program, it is my expectation that my institution will request I convert the only remaining in-person course to an online format. To be proactive, it is my intention to work with the Office of Instructional Consulting this summer, to restructure Participation Training using best practices, and utilize the skills of those consultants to accomplish this task. The purpose of this session is to construct, through discussion, experiences and shared knowledge that learning professionals have had with converting face-to-face courses to an online delivery format.