Educating Educators: Implementing Quality Online Teaching Certification Programs

Abstract

The online teaching platform has a firm foothold on many university campuses. With the majority of schools now offering online courses, e-learning facilitators have been creating and offering online certification programs that instruct and motivate teachers to design courses using best practices in order to deliver quality online courses. Completing an online certification course provides the best opportunity for flexible, collaborative learning in addition to offering the following benefits to instructors: educating instructors on technology options, establishing learning objectives, constructing an online presence, building a sense of community online, avoiding information dumping, and employing pedagogical tools to instruct and challenge students. Instructors also benefit from creating their own practice courses to employ what they have learned in a peer-review process where fellow classmates assess the quality of the courses. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, faculty members interact with their course materials from the unique perspective of a student, creating a metacognitive space for faculty to understand more deeply their students' learning processes. Many platforms exist for training faculty, but a virtual professional learning committee constructed and managed by an institution's e-learning facilitators serves faculty the best. As a result, higher education institutions should encourage and incentivize all instructors who teach in an online platform to participate in and complete a quality online teaching certification course.