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This article shares the curriculum and evaluation findings over four years for a faculty development program aimed at increasing skills in designing and teaching online courses. The University of Louisville's "Delphi U" is a four-day retreat style program covering 17 modules, each of which includes an exercise or activity. Over the four years, evaluation data guided continuous improvements in the course to meet faculty needs. Overall course satisfaction was generally very high with many scores remaining at or above 5 on a 6 point scale, although some issues still exist with the topics of using online technologies and applying copyright law.
The use of internet courses within higher education is at an all-time high and continuing to grow (Allan & Seaman, 2007); and preparation of faculty to teach online is a critical component of successful distance education programs (Shea, 2007). Many universities are preparing faculty by offering faculty development and training programs to help them convert face-to-face classes to online classes. The 2007 Sloan Consortium report on distance education identifies that virtually all national institutions with online offerings are seeing upward enrollment trends (Allan & Seaman, 2007). In 2000, Palloff and Pratt began to focus on the distinct differences between good teaching face-to-face and good teaching online remarking that it was not just a case of "converting" courses but redesigning them to help distance learners build "communities of practice."
As the University of Louisville's (U of L's) online student body expanded, the need for faculty development in online teaching increased. The solution was to expand the faculty development center, the Delphi Center for Teaching and Learning (Delphi Center), to support faculty development in instructional technology with a focus on online instruction. Prior to 2008, the Delphi Center's faculty development model was one-on-one training sessions, small group sessions for faculty groups "on demand", and brief focused seminars advertised to the entire faculty community. While highly effective, this individualized approach was inefficient, costly, and labor intensive. Initially, the Delphi Center did not have instructional design professionals on staff. Instead, they contracted with experienced faculty from the College of Education and Human Development for this support. In 2009, they expanded their training team to three full-time instructional designers and four fulltime e-learning support staff.
The Delphi...