Mentoring Mentors
Location
Main Foyer
Start
1-16-2018 5:15 PM
End
1-16-2018 5:35 PM
Short Description
How do we leverage mentor resources to support mentors for an online course? How do we continuously improve our mentor program so it can be scalable and sustainable across learning management systems? This session will include the sharing of our experience with offering online mentor training course at our institution for the last a few years and how we plan to improve the current program based on the mentor survey results.
Abstract
Mentors, or teaching assistants, play a critical role in education. In this session, we are focusing on supporting mentors for distance learning education. Many distance learning courses would not be successfully delivered without the help of online mentors. Having mentors in distance learning courses is a common practice in higher education. On the other hand, teaching assistantship is also the foundation of faculty development. We are now in the era when face-to-face and online are not mutually exclusive. Students may have the choice of modalities for the same credit course. Our future faculty should be trained to deliver courses regardless of modalities.
Instructors, administrators, instructional designers and project managers are all welcome to this session. It’ll be presented on a poster with sections to cover objectives, resource content, tools, survey results, challenges and implications. Hope this will serve as a path to successful implementation of mentor program in institutions.
Our mentor training program has been in place for nearly a decade. When I came on board as an instructional designer, the training course was in Blackboard. Several components of the training course have been reevaluated and revamped over the past three years. Now as FSU is transitioning to Canvas, we created the training course in Canvas to guide mentors how to acclimate themselves to the new system. Major pedagogical components stayed intact while the technological aspects of the modules were replaced with Canvas features and tools.
This four-week self-paced online training course provides online mentoring strategies, addresses FSU policies, and provides guidance and best practices for using Canvas tools. We issue a certificate of completion when mentors successfully pass the quizzes and complete all the assignments. Four components of the training will be discussed in the session: Introduction to Online Mentoring, Obtaining Assistance with Canvas, Managing Online Communication & Discussion and Issues in Grading & Assessment.
We solicit feedback from mentors at the end of each training period. Currently we are in the process of compiling the fall semester feedback. We’ll have a month to make adjustments to the training site and prepare for sprint 2018.
During the conversations of sharing our challenges at the conference I look forward to seeking solutions as well as providing suggestions. Together we’ll be driving distance learning to excellence.
Format
Poster Session
Institutional level targeted
Higher Ed
Moderator
Maureen McDermott, NSU
Mentoring Mentors
Main Foyer
Mentors, or teaching assistants, play a critical role in education. In this session, we are focusing on supporting mentors for distance learning education. Many distance learning courses would not be successfully delivered without the help of online mentors. Having mentors in distance learning courses is a common practice in higher education. On the other hand, teaching assistantship is also the foundation of faculty development. We are now in the era when face-to-face and online are not mutually exclusive. Students may have the choice of modalities for the same credit course. Our future faculty should be trained to deliver courses regardless of modalities.
Instructors, administrators, instructional designers and project managers are all welcome to this session. It’ll be presented on a poster with sections to cover objectives, resource content, tools, survey results, challenges and implications. Hope this will serve as a path to successful implementation of mentor program in institutions.
Our mentor training program has been in place for nearly a decade. When I came on board as an instructional designer, the training course was in Blackboard. Several components of the training course have been reevaluated and revamped over the past three years. Now as FSU is transitioning to Canvas, we created the training course in Canvas to guide mentors how to acclimate themselves to the new system. Major pedagogical components stayed intact while the technological aspects of the modules were replaced with Canvas features and tools.
This four-week self-paced online training course provides online mentoring strategies, addresses FSU policies, and provides guidance and best practices for using Canvas tools. We issue a certificate of completion when mentors successfully pass the quizzes and complete all the assignments. Four components of the training will be discussed in the session: Introduction to Online Mentoring, Obtaining Assistance with Canvas, Managing Online Communication & Discussion and Issues in Grading & Assessment.
We solicit feedback from mentors at the end of each training period. Currently we are in the process of compiling the fall semester feedback. We’ll have a month to make adjustments to the training site and prepare for sprint 2018.
During the conversations of sharing our challenges at the conference I look forward to seeking solutions as well as providing suggestions. Together we’ll be driving distance learning to excellence.