U of Ideas of General Interest -- July 2000
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Contact: Craig Chamberlain, Education Editor, (217) 333-2894; [email protected]
HIGHER EDUCATION
UI offering online education for community college faculty
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- A University of Illinois department that has specialized in teaching community college educators is bringing that expertise online.
Starting this fall, the human resource education (HRE) department in the UI's College of Education will offer an online sequence of courses designed to improve the teaching and instructional leadership skills of the community college faculty members who take them.
"I don't know of any other program like this," says HRE head Tim Wentling, whose department -- along with the college's department of educational organization and leadership -- has offered programs for community college teachers and administrators for more than a decade.
The program was developed, in part, because community colleges in Illinois, as in many other states, are in the midst of a massive faculty turnover, said Debra Bragg, coordinator of the department's specialization in community college leadership. "We're reaching a period where a large percentage of faculty are retiring," she said, a consequence of the fact that most community colleges were started in the 1960s and the faculty who started them are nearing the end of their careers.
Another part of the picture: Many instructors are part-time, and though most instructors have graduate degrees in their area of expertise, they have little or no formal training in the best ways to teach. Adult education and training -- in various contexts, from public colleges to private industry -- is the focus of teaching and research in the HRE department.
In addition, online education is a developing expertise of both HRE and the college, and there are at least two key reasons for offering such a sequence of courses online, Bragg said.
"The first is access and the opportunity to provide graduate instruction in a critical area that people just couldn't [take advantage of] if we didn't put it online ... The second reason is because community college faculty themselves are expected to move into this area of Internet-based instruction, and by participating in a program that makes them a student in that delivery mode, we believe that that's a great way for them to learn."
The use of educational technology, both online and in the classroom, will be the focus of one of four units offered in the sequence of courses.
The program will start small, with only 15 to 20 students in the group that will start this fall, and Wentling said the first group will be considered experimental. As with two existing online degree programs offered by the college, both begun two years ago, UI faculty members want to study online education even as it carries it out, he said.
But Wentling said he was hopeful a model would develop that could eventually offer education and training to a large number of community college faculty members in Illinois and beyond.
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