Abstract:

Most, if not all, educators who teach face-to-face courses have been themselves students in more or less the same setting and should, therefore, be able to empathize with their students. Yet many of those about to teach, or already teaching, "blended" (part face-to-face, part online) or fully-online courses know precious little about the particularities of online pedagogy or andragogy, and have never been online students.

In order to address the above deficiencies, efforts were undertaken at the University of Victoria to create in-service professional development opportunities for faculty.

The first step entailed the design and implementation of an 18-week, fully-online pilot course in online education offered free of charge to all interested University of Victoria educators. The course, which was called OEF (for Online Education Fundamentals), was mainly led by an online education specialist (the author), but several modules were facilitated by subject matter experts from different departments on campus. Certificates were issued by UVic's Learning & Teaching Centre to participants upon successful completion of the course.

The next and more ambitious step involves planning a regular, 10-week OEF course to be offered once a year to UVic educators. In this session we will discuss some of the outcomes of the pilot course and the planning of future OEF offerings in light of the 'lessons learned'.

Keywords:

In-service, faculty development, teacher development, teacher education, online education, higher education, post-secondary education.