Ensuring High Quality Online
Professional Development
Paty Savage
Instructional Technology Director
The Schultz Center for Teaching and
Leadership

What will you learn in this session?
• Yes
– Some practical strategies you can immediately apply in your
online professional development implementation
– Tips and lessons learned
– Standard procedures for moving F2F PD to online
– Review process
– Deployment tips
• No
– Blackboard training
– Our institutions' specific outcomes and goals

The Schultz Center for Teaching and
Leadership
• Professional Development facility in NE Florida
• Our Theory Of Action
• Duval County Public Schools
• Our “students” are teachers and administrators
• Expansion - Blackboard Academic Suite
• “Army of one”

Topics for Today
• Planning
• Development
• Review Process
• Deployment
• Administration
• Business
• Ideas

The Planning Stage
• IT Department Support and Stakeholder Buy-in
• Blackboard Training
• Standard Operating Procedure for Online Course
Development
• Identify Blackboard experts/course designers
• Identify Subject Matter Experts (SME)
• Over-communicate
– Online course review rubric
– Planning tools
– Examples of exemplary online courses

Planning Stage – “Gotcha’s”
• Ownership – information silos
• Importance of scaffolding
• Gathering of appropriate materials
• Copyright considerations
• Digital Immigrants vs. Digital Natives
• No variety of content planned for

The Development Stage
• Online Course Review Training
• Distribution of rubric
• Develop course template based on rubric
– Identify what cannot be deleted
– Provide training in using the template
– Course shell
• Identify the teams and get them writing
• Regularly “check in” – look for opportunities for
interaction, appropriate discussion board prompts, and
materials.

Development Stage – “Gotcha’s”
• Too many assignments, quizzes, and readings
• Busy work
• Copyrighted materials – intellectual property
• Low level thinking skills
• Low level prompts in the Discussion Board
• Lack of grading criteria/rubrics
• Technical Issues
– Low level recordings
– HUGE PowerPoint files
– Large files
– Video issues

The Review Stage
• Online course review training
• Form review teams
– SME, instructional designers, outside member
• Review Process
– Meet
– Complete review and rubric
– Discuss if needed
– Ask writers for explanation
– Submit results and rubrics to SA
– Writers make revisions (if needed)
– SA re-review

Review Stage “Gotcha’s”
• Evaluation of the instructor
• Personal bias
• Veering away from the rubric
• Not enough feedback or vague feedback
• Incomplete review

Deployment Stage
• Indentify the “course master”
• Establish naming conventions
• Establish course ID conventions
• Establish a process for user registration and enrollment
• Orientation Meeting
• Truth in advertising – Expectations and time commitment
• Timeline for course
• Closing/archiving

Deployment “Gotcha’s”
• Facilitator doesn’t meet expectations
• Technical problems will happen
– Safety nets
– Technical support
• Low completion rates
– Time requirements not made clear
• No differentiation

System Administrator
• Monitor facilitators – provide reports
• Monitor participants – performance dashboard
• Report completion rates
• Identify completers
• Copying, handling enrollment, closing and archiving

Ideas for Success
• Start with a hybrid course
• Online professional book study
• Online collaboration on lesson plans
• Online professional learning communities
• Online school PLC’s – principals going “green”

Want more? Be green!
• Who wants to print out a handout? Instead, check out
my posts on the BbWorld ’09 Discussion Board at
Blackboard Connections (
http://connections.blackboard.com).
• I’ve posted:
– My PPT
– Online course rubric
– SOP for online course development

Contact Info
• savagep@schultzcenter.org
• http://www.schultzcenter.org
• http://twitter.com/patysavage