Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

Online Learning Faculty Summit Recap

Posted by Heather Guevara

If you have FOMO (fear of missing out) like me, you probably made sure not to miss our first-ever PCC Online Faculty Summit. If you missed the Summit, you’re probably hearing from your colleagues about what you missed out on and now you have FOMO. It’s warranted.

Overview

The Summit was a full-day professional development event for faculty teaching fully online classes at PCC. The event, which was held at Cascade Campus on May 3, 2019, included the following: a keynote address, a student panel, great food including a dinner reception, and more than 30 breakout sessions facilitated by invited guests and our own PCC faculty and staff (59 presenters in total!). We were able to serve all online faculty who wished to attend and offered stipends for part-time faculty. This special day brought together over 200 faculty, staff, and administrators share best-practices in online learning. This event could not have happened without the support of the President’s Fund for Excellence, the teamwork of our amazing Online Learning staff, our invited guest presenters, the faculty and staff presenters, and all of the faculty and staff who attended the event.

What we’re hearing

We have an post-event evaluation open for attendees. Here is a summary of themes from the evaluation and from verbal feedback:

• “I pulled at least one method from each session that I can use to improve my online teaching environments. These sessions were great!”
• “I felt that some breakout sessions were over my head/skill level and some were under. It would have been helpful to know if the session was geared to towards beginner, intermediate or advanced use.” We heard the idea that you wanted tracks by user or experience level on a number of surveys and from verbal feedback.
• “Really terrific range of sessions, and I appreciated the ability to choose both theoretical topics and highly practical topics.”
• “There were several topics I wanted to see but were at the same time. I was sad to have to choose one over the others.” We heard this one many times. You wanted recurring sessions so you wouldn’t have to choose just one each session.

So what now?

Watch for presentations materials. Attended the Summit and want the slide decks and presentation materials? Missed out and couldn’t attend? Once we have curated all of the materials and have made them accessible, we’ll be posting materials. Watch for an email with a link to presentation materials!

Watch for encore presentations and training opportunities. We have assembled a team to look at session evaluations, overall Summit feedback and opportunities for encore presentations during college and campus In-Service activities, in TLCs throughout the year, and via other professional development opportunities that can be targeted at online faculty.

Consider writing a best-practices blog post. Yes, you can author a post. We especially love faculty posts. Consider taking something you learned at the Summit and piloting it in your online course. Share with your peers what you learned about a new tool or practice.

A big THANK YOU to all who made this a great day. Most of all, we are excited about the lasting impact this event will have on our the high-quality online instruction we provide our students!