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.)
About the Author
Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.