ESF has developed our first fully online bachelor’s degree, an upper-division program that will have its first cohort this fall. This program is both a new program for the college and is composed of a core of courses that are also new for the college. Our college as a whole is fairly new to online, particularly in terms of programs as opposed to one-off courses. While most of the faculty involved in developing the courses for this program have extensive teaching experience, few have had much experience with online teaching and learning. In our presentation, we will share the cohort approach we have implemented to help guide faculty to incorporate best practices for online design and help meet all accessibility standards from the start.

Many online course development processes often start with some sort of crash course in using the LMS. We made the deliberate decision that the LMS would be addressed much later in the process and that faculty would not have to do most of the build work. This alleviated a common faculty concern to their voluntary participation in working on the program. We instead focused on introducing the attributes contributing to quality online courses early on and had most of the early development work focused on developing authentic assessments and quality interactions with a fairly even distribution across a modularized course timeline. Concurrent course development combined with regular group meetings allowed for conversations across the curriculum to help ensure scaffolding towards the programmatic objectives, as well as to just share insights, challenges, and feedback among peers. Much of the faculty development was done through more of a just-in-time approach as the IDs working with individual faculty could then provide workshops based on common challenges and at points when most faculty were about ready to move on to another development phase.

Rather than steering faculty into some more common LMS tools, the faculty were asked to develop more authentic assessments and then the IDs were responsible to help make them work with the tools available. This has resulted in the utilization of a greater variety of tools within the LMS in a greater variety of ways, and courses that have familiarity in design across the curriculum without being too formulaic.