Web 2.0

7 lures to hook faculty into training

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 10/01/10

1) If you’re doing organized training such as a weekly session, keep it short (no more than an hour) and focus on one tool. Chandler-Gilbert Community College’s McGlasson recommends you introduce the tool, teach the absolute basics, then give faculty a chance to try it out for themselves.

2) Create sub-fi ve-minute videos to show instructors how to perform a specifi c task. As one example, Haggerty of NJIT created 30-plus videos taking instructors through operations for the open source learning management system Moodle.

3) At every stage of instruction, help faculty members to come up with ideas for how the tool can be useful for teaching and learning. McGlasson shares input from instructors on her websites to spread the ideas and best practices.

4) Make sure you have two people in the workshop setting—one to do the talking and move from person to person, and the other to operate the mouse or touchpad at the front of the room to demonstrate.

5) Market your sessions regularly with e-mails to the faculty (and postings to your other social media forums). Tell instructors what they’ll learn and how it can be used. Include a sign-up link.

6) Survey your training attendees to fi nd out what favorites they have among the tools, which ones they probably won’t be using, and what they want more of in the future.

7) Don’t be tempted to expand the length of training sessions. Even though McGlasson’s attendees always responded that they wanted more time for training, they also said they didn’t want to add an extra 30 minutes onto sessions to get it. (That’s where suggestion 2, above, comes into play.)