Review by: Schönwald, Ingrid (2004-11-25)

This article describes the faculty support approach of the University of Central Florida (UCF), which received the 2003 Sloan-C Excellence in Online Teaching and Learning Award for Faculty Development.

The institutional background of UCF is characterised by a student number of approx. 44,000 students, of whom 26% are enrolled in a fully-online course. The size at UCF has doubled in the last ten years regarding the number of students, faculty and campus locations, which implicates the hiring of over 100 new faculty a year.

The systematic approach to embrace online learning started in 1996. From the beginning support was focused on departments and colleges prepared to plan for program development. There is a cycle of planning and assessment to create a systemic, complex faculty support ecosystem at UCF which is provided by three units within the Division of Information Technologies and Resources: the Centre for Distributed Learning (CDL) Course Development & Web Services (CDWS), and the Research Initiative for Teaching Effectiveness (RITE).

Truman describes the a hierarchical order of elements of the UCF’s faculty support ecosystem, addressing different skill levels and teaching technology ambitions of the faculty. The approach is illustrated by a pyramid whose adjoining sides represent the integrated instructional and institutional goals of the ecosystem. Based on the institutional IT infrastructure and architecture, the core of support is provided by the CDWS through design team, which are assigned to faculty and a full-service, multimedia production house. There is a staged approach to performance support through a variety of online resources, and training opportunities on different interest and competency levels, many of these offers are organised as faculty community approach.

One key feature of this approach is the integration of faculty support and motivation: CDL has responsibility and funding to allocate incentives for online program development and monitor the success of these allocations. Incentive packages including a notebook computer, a certain level of free support and the opportunity for research project collaboration on the scholarship of teaching within the disciplines.

The author admits that one challenge is to manage the high support demands and stresses the importance of an efficient collaboration among specialised support units. Finally the article includes some UCF web-addresses as an offer for the reader to explore the implementation of the presented faculty support concept more in-depth.

Overall this article gives an interesting insight into a sophisticated faculty support approach, which even though may not be applicable to small institutions will give some inspiration about the integration of support offerings.