Most people can remember school days passing with their faces buried in notebook pages and their hands scribbling away until the end of the class period. Today's classrooms are a different story. Extraordinary advances in communications and information technologies coupled with changing student demographics have made distance education an attractive method for reaching new student audiences. The course has been available to Penn State faculty registered to teach in the World Campus since last year.
Users work through the course at their own pace.
Those taking Faculty Development 101 for informational purposes only can finish both in an afternoon and gain a source of useful references, resources and templates to continue more specific course planning work. Course participants who are not registered faculty have access to activities that do not require interaction with other students. Some introductory elements of the course are tailored to World Campus faculty, but most lessons are constructed around skills and issues important for all distance educators and applicable to resident instructors who employ information technologies as well. An important course session offers research on the characteristics of distance education students and ways to tailor course content to meet their goals and needs. To maintain the balance between that quality learning and flexibility, World Campus faculty use Faculty Development 101 to adapt their teaching strategies to an environment where body language cannot offer cues to learning.