Note: This post is a continuation of my last blog post. If you haven’t read it, I’d highly recommend reading it for context.

Brainstorming Faculty Development Courses
In the first months I started my position, I worked with the president and one of the ‘senior fellows’ (a position similar to a depart chair) to brainstorm potential courses. This process occurred over several meetings when I first visited campus and later through video conferences.  Here is what we tentatively planned that I would create:

• New Faculty Orientation - Being a small school that occasionally brings in ‘resident fellows’ (temporary faculty), we needed a comprehensive onboarding program. Most efforts to train faculty were piecemeal; they were conducted on an ‘as-needed’ basis by senior fellows. I ascertained from our meetings that this course would be a top priority. New faculty must navigate our learning management system, Moodle, to perform basic tasks, such as uploading files, creating assignments, and using the gradebook. New faculty also need to understand the expectations of Carroll Faculty and explore andragogical insights for online teaching. While some part-time faculty have informal teaching experience in a face-to-face settings (ex. A pastor who delivers sermons), we determined that the typical adjunct instructor would need help in translating their expertise to our online learning platform.
• Turabian Citation Style - While Carroll does mandate a writing style for all classes, Turabian is encouraged and taught in the orientation course for Master-level students. Since not all faculty have used Turabian or might need a refresher, we determined that there is a need for a course that covers the basic of formatting a paper and citing sources in this style. Turabian, along with Society of Biblical Literature (SBL), are two most common citation styles for theology & religious studies.
• High Touch Technologies -  As a former online student, I often felt disconnected from my instructor because I could not see or hear them, making some online courses feel impersonal. I personally want to demonstrate how to use these ‘high touch’ tools and my supervisors agreed. By ‘high touch’, I’m referring to technology tools where students can see and hear their instructors, instead of reading printed materials. This term was coined by the futurist John Nasbitt roughly twenty years ago to contrast technologies that connect people (i.e. high touch)  with ‘high tech’ tools that alienate people. The importance of social and cognitive presence in education is well documented in educational literature.
• Copyright and Fair Use - Sharing learning resources online becomes challenging as most copyright laws were designed for a print-based world. In my meetings with supervisors, we recognized a learning need; that faculty know how to navigate ethical use of copyrighted resources. There are a lot of myths regarding fair use and varying interpretations, so conducting a fair-use analysis would have to be a central component of this course.

How Much Content? 
One of the challenges of designing courses with digital badges is determining how much content to include in a single course. There is currently no standard (similar to credit hour formula for Carnegie courses) to determine how much content each badge should cover. I surveyed how other colleges issued digital badges and determined that I would create courses that take about 5 hours to complete.  Most of the courses that culminated with a digital badge required, on average, this time commitment, so this is the standard I adopted for courses. 

Let’s Discuss!
If you are an instructional technologist, instructor, or college administrator, what are some potential courses that you need at your institution? If you have implemented professional development courses, whether or not they culminate in a digital badge, what courses do you offer?  Also, do you have a standard for how long a course should take to complete?

Feel free to respond to this blog post - I’d love to hear how faculty development works at other institutions!