The Faculty Development and Instructional Center at Northern Illinois University (NIU) faced a problem. It was responsible for training 1,200 faculty dispersed throughout the northern half of Illinois, and therefore had a difficult time getting so many busy and geographically dispersed faculty members to its training sessions. But the solution became clear: Wimba Classroom and its ability to create archives and mp4 recordings.
NIU’s Faculty Development and Instructional Center supports more than 1,200 faculty, academic supportive professional staff, and graduate teaching assistants through a variety of programs, resources, and services. The Center’s mission is to provide comprehensive support on teaching effectiveness and technology integration to faculty and academic supportive professional staff. For years it offered face-to-face professional development and training but always believed these sessions could be better attended.
“Our institution and had been looking at ways to provide just-in-time training to our faculty. Each year our department provides about 160 sessions ranging from uses of technology in teaching to best practices of instructional design. We wanted to make training more convenient. We’re about an hour west of Chicago and have a lot of faculty who commute, so we wanted to find ways for them to participate without having to come to campus,” recalls Dr. Jason Rhode, Assistant Director, Faculty Development and Instructional Designer Center, Northern Illinois University.
In 2008, NIU began using Wimba Classroom to deliver monthly online faculty development workshops to faculty, staff, and teaching assistants. These sessions included a wide array of pedagogical and technical topics, ranging from discussions about best practices for online teaching using detailed step-by-step instructions via application sharing, to tips for teaching with Blackboard. Other topics included Tips for Effective Group Collaboration in Blackboard and Tracking Online Student Performance. All sessions are archived and posted online along with links to any referenced workshop materials for on-demand viewing afterwards.
The Center immediately noticed that offering these sessions live online helped increase the average attendance per session. But the Center also found that the archives quickly became a hot commodity for those who couldn’t log in to the live trainings.
While each archive was available online for viewing 24/7, some notable drawbacks still existed. Those unable to participate in the live sessions who wished to view recorded sessions needed to remember to revisit the website to see when new archives became available. In addition, recorded sessions could only be viewed online via a computer, yet increasing use of mobile media players were making it possible for such content to be experienced while on-the-go.
“We wanted to take advantage of the opportunities to create and use MP4 archives in Wimba Classroom. We wanted to make our archives available for our faculty who aren’t near campus. We wanted to help those who commute and make our archives available to them on their mobile devices,” says Dr. Rhode.
The expanded archive capabilities of Wimba Classroom made it possible for NIU to not only continue to provide archived online faculty development sessions online, but also create a podcast of online faculty development programs available in iTunes where exported MP4 archives in podcast format are published for faculty to view anytime, anywhere, on their mobile media players. According to the Center, these resulting podcast archives – which include application sharing and eBoard content – are amazingly clear when viewed on an iPod or iPhone. All this is possible without much additional technical know-how on the part of faculty development staff and archives can easily be searched and accessed from within iTunes either on a computer, iPod Touch, or iPhone as well as from any other podcast aggregator of choice.
“With Wimba, faculty can now have their cake and eat it too!” says Dr. Rhode. “The expanded archive capabilities of Wimba make it possible for NIU to not only continue to provide archived online faculty development sessions but also create a podcast for faculty to view anytime, anywhere on their mobile media player.”
Since adopting Wimba Classroom campus-wide, the Center has made extensive use of the collaborative features of Wimba Classroom by offering online workshops each month. While the Center continues to offer face-to-face hands-on technology workshops, the online workshops offered using Wimba Classroom have been the ideal format for introducing new pedagogical or technological approaches as well as to foster online discussion surrounding a given topic.
Faculty can participate from the comfort of their own homes or offices and the Center has received numerous testimonies from faculty praising the format. Those teaching in one of NIU’s satellite campuses, each over 40 miles away, can participate remotely, saving both time and money.
In fact, the online collaborative format possible using Wimba Classroom has made it possible for NIU to open online sessions to faculty and staff from other institutions. Faculty and staff from nearly a dozen other institutions from across the U.S. and even Europe have participated in NIU online faculty development workshops, including DePaul University, University of Illinois Chicago, Concordia University Chicago, University of Alaska Anchorage, Grand Rapids Community College, Bournemouth University (U.K.), and West Kentucky Community & Technical College.
The Center’s collection of archives continues to grow and has become an invaluable resource available for NIU faculty, staff, and graduate teaching assistants, as well as the larger academic community.
“Our faculty are really enjoying the archives and it’s been nice to share our trainings with other institutions,” says Rhode, clearly pleased. “We’ve only just begun to realize the possibilities of Wimba Classroom for professional development and look forward to continuing to expand our use of Wimba Classroom in the future!”
Northern Illinois University
Northern Illinois University
