UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- A joint effort between the World Campus and the College of Education has resulted in three of its faculty members earning the Online Learning Consortium’s Best-in-Track award for faculty development.
Laurence B. Boggess, Gerald K. Le Tendre and Ronald Musoleno produced a webcast titled “Going Global: Preparing Faculty To Teach International Students.’’ The presentation will be internationally webcast in October on creating OL 2500, an online training course familiarizing Penn State faculty with the issues of cross-cultural awareness and communication and protocols for instruction, advising and course adjustment.
Boggess is director of faculty development for World Campus; Le Tendre is department head for education policy studies and is a nationally known expert in comparative and international education; and Musoleno is associate professor of education policy studies.
“OLC has been making an effort to reach out internationally and become less North American-centric,’’ said Boggess, who is also a faculty member in the College of Education’s online master’s degree in educational leadership. “This particular session is about helping faculty learn how to teach online with the particular sensitivity to their international students.’’
David H. Monk, dean of the College of Education, said this type of training module is a critical element in expanding Penn State’s reach internationally. “This is terrific news,’’ Monk said. “The international audience is so vast and so central to the goal of bringing Penn State opportunities to global audiences.’’
The Orlando conference attracts thousands of faculty developers and instructional designers and different people who do online teaching in higher ed.
“As online learning expands around the world, faculty will need to be more aware of the diversity of students they will encounter,’’ Le Tendre said.“We are working to draw on the considerable resources from around Penn State to create a course that will help faculty to become comfortable teaching international students, and help them learn what practices can benefit their students.’’
Le Tendre said the course is an opportunity to engage more faculty in dialogs, reflection and discussion of how best to create supportive and challenging online learning environments for a global community.
Boggess, who won an OLC award last year for a conceptual paper with graduate student Elizabeth Shakespeare, said the OLC “really responded to this as a timely idea and a necessary idea.’’
While he wasn’t certain, he said he believes that no one else in the country is doing this in the formal way of actually constructing a faculty-training module around this topic.
“The University’s making a very concerted effort to support faculty in very meaningful ways, one of them making possible our curriculum for online teaching,’’ Boggess said.