Creating an Online Faculty Professional Development Workshop by Collaborating with Campus Partners
Session Format
In-person Presentation
Conference Tracks
Outreach, Services, and Programs
Short Description
Institutions often require faculty to include academic integrity statements in their syllabi, but like their students, they too may experience confusion about how and when to cite sources. Come and learn how an associate dean, learning designer, and instruction librarian collaborated to create a five-day, online asynchronous workshop for strengthening academic integrity skills of faculty in Northwestern University’s School of Professional Studies. In this presentation we will cover how to: identify campus entities with whom to partner, divide up the workload, develop content, organize modules in a learning management system, assess performance, and plan future iterations.
Long Description
This online workshop was created to respond to a need recognized by university leadership: incidents of academic dishonesty had increased over time and were expected to continue to be a challenge due the ease of copying or purchasing online. University administration wanted to offer faculty the opportunity to brush up on academic integrity policies and practices while interacting with their peers online. The associate dean of graduate students at the School of Professional Studies took the lead on assembling a team to develop the workshop, which included a senior learning designer and an instruction librarian, with campus instructional technologists available to provide assistance. The team first met in summer 2017 to discuss what materials already existed for building an online course on academic integrity for faculty, rather than students. Finding that there was nothing readily available, the team started with a blank slate and a challenging to-do list. The goal of the workshop was to provide a refresher course for part-time, adjunct faculty to reacquaint themselves with good scholarship practices and tools that they could share with their students to help them write better papers, and to recognize and avoid plagiarism. The learning designer and librarian drew up a plan that divided up responsibilities and held them accountable to each other. Both of them looked for exemplary materials on academic integrity, on the web as well as in print. They shared their findings via email and met in person every few weeks but progress was slow. The original intent was to have a workshop in place by winter quarter (a six-month timeframe from the time of inception) but this was found to be too ambitious. Ultimately, it took about 12 months to assemble the content and place it in the learning management system (i.e. Canvas), to test the modules, and receive the final blessing from the dean. The first workshop ran in July 2018, and subsequent workshops have run in January 2019, July 2019, and October 2019. After each workshop, the full team (dean, learning designer, faculty member) meets to discuss what was successful and identify what to improve. For example, a change that we made after the first workshop was to lengthen the duration. Initially, the workshop was spread over three days but after the first run was extended to five days, with a weekend for catching up. After the second run, we added a faculty member to our facilitation team, to add an instructor’s voice to the discussion fora, and to help share the workload. All of the facilitators (i.e. learning designer, librarian, faculty member) are responsible for grading and posting on discussion boards. In this session, the librarian facilitator will present her experiences and share tips and will be joined via a video by the other original facilitator of this workshop, Krissy Wilson.
Learning Objectives
- Participants will learn how to create a collaboration model to work with partners at their institution;
- Participants will learn how to organize instructional content for an asynchronous, online faculty workshop;
- Participants will be able to prepare for a workshop of their own based on lessons learned from the presenters.
Creating an Online Faculty Professional Development Workshop by Collaborating with Campus Partners
This online workshop was created to respond to a need recognized by university leadership: incidents of academic dishonesty had increased over time and were expected to continue to be a challenge due the ease of copying or purchasing online. University administration wanted to offer faculty the opportunity to brush up on academic integrity policies and practices while interacting with their peers online. The associate dean of graduate students at the School of Professional Studies took the lead on assembling a team to develop the workshop, which included a senior learning designer and an instruction librarian, with campus instructional technologists available to provide assistance. The team first met in summer 2017 to discuss what materials already existed for building an online course on academic integrity for faculty, rather than students. Finding that there was nothing readily available, the team started with a blank slate and a challenging to-do list. The goal of the workshop was to provide a refresher course for part-time, adjunct faculty to reacquaint themselves with good scholarship practices and tools that they could share with their students to help them write better papers, and to recognize and avoid plagiarism. The learning designer and librarian drew up a plan that divided up responsibilities and held them accountable to each other. Both of them looked for exemplary materials on academic integrity, on the web as well as in print. They shared their findings via email and met in person every few weeks but progress was slow. The original intent was to have a workshop in place by winter quarter (a six-month timeframe from the time of inception) but this was found to be too ambitious. Ultimately, it took about 12 months to assemble the content and place it in the learning management system (i.e. Canvas), to test the modules, and receive the final blessing from the dean. The first workshop ran in July 2018, and subsequent workshops have run in January 2019, July 2019, and October 2019. After each workshop, the full team (dean, learning designer, faculty member) meets to discuss what was successful and identify what to improve. For example, a change that we made after the first workshop was to lengthen the duration. Initially, the workshop was spread over three days but after the first run was extended to five days, with a weekend for catching up. After the second run, we added a faculty member to our facilitation team, to add an instructor’s voice to the discussion fora, and to help share the workload. All of the facilitators (i.e. learning designer, librarian, faculty member) are responsible for grading and posting on discussion boards. In this session, the librarian facilitator will present her experiences and share tips and will be joined via a video by the other original facilitator of this workshop, Krissy Wilson.