Developing a Graduate Level Online Program: One University’s Move to Offering an Online Teaching Certificate for Teachers, Instructors and Trainers
Abstract
The importance of online delivery of courses and programs in higher education has reached the critical juncture in colleges, professional training centers, and public schools. These institutions are now competing for the same group of students in the distance market and have similar challenges. To stay competitive, online teachers will need to have the expertise to teach effectively in this online learning environment. Our goal at our private university was to develop a model with our faculty team that would provide comprehensive and individualized instruction for aspiring teachers, instructors, and trainers. It was thru the cooperative efforts of our faculty team sharing expertise in online delivery and developing methods aligned with their content areas that guided our model to fruition. This paper chronicles an action research model that was employed to develop a graduate online teaching certificate for Pre K-12, higher education, and training and development instructors.