Theme V: Crafting a New Model for Faculty Development With Blackboard at Its Center

As the Virtual Core Project draws to a close, AIT staff have begun to think about a fresher and more productive model for faculty training and development. The pioneering period in building course sites is at an end: rather than providing faculty with multiple semesters of released time or stipends in return for developing a fully- or partially- virtual section of a course, the CUNY Online model (funded by the Sloan Foundation) provides a stipend for a single semester, and even this support will shortly disappear. It is critical that we devise a faculty training model that advances the development at Brooklyn College of a cohesive collection of quality, pedagogically sound Web-based courses.

AIT’s early approach to faculty development did not consider Blackboard (rapidly becoming the industry standard) or the various course site templates the staff has developed. Indeed, electronic learning platforms were in their infancy, relatively cumbersome, and far from rich in features. Today, Blackboard provides great efficiencies to faculty building course sites.

By today’s standard, perhaps the most obvious flaw in our original approach to faculty development is that the sites it has produced are not scalable--they are individual, one-offs that cannot easily be repurposed. Instead of a coherent distance learning program, a random sample of course sites (albeit they are of high quality) has been produced.

Additionally, we have yet to develop a true standard for course site quality that measures the value the site adds to the institution’s educational program. However, Blackboard offers built-in assessment tools as well as the ability to create online student communities and study groups.

At the same time, more and more publishers of textbooks are making available complementary online multimedia material. Many of these publishers have forged relationships with Blackboard, enabling their electronic materials easily to become part of instructors’ course documents.

For all these reasons, the Blackboard electronic learning platform offers a surer approach to developing robust course sites. Its shorter learning curve can lead to a broader impact for Web-based teaching. And, despite the charges of some its critics, Blackboard is not a cookie-cutter approach to course site building: it is simply a software platform that saves faculty the trouble of learning to write code, and of cobbling together a number of software packages in order to produce a single course site. In no way does it dictate the shape of an instructor’s course or site.

Like everything else, pedagogy for faculty training and development has evolved--it is organic, not static. Simple mathematics shows that, if the College were to continue following the FIPSE project’s model for faculty training and development, it would take 200 years for us to reach the entire faculty. We must employ a more cost-effective approach. With Blackboard addressing a number of technology training issues, and the workshop series designed by Dr. Sylvie Richards (“Creating a Robust Syllabus,” “Creating Technology-Rich Assignments,” and so forth) providing sound pedagogical guidance, Brooklyn College will be able to make progress in Web-based instruction both rapidly and in a quality fashion.