UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — In an effort to create more research opportunities for Penn State World Campus students, Penn State is offering a new professional development course to encourage faculty to work with online students.
The course, “Conducting Research with Your Online Students,” which starts June 11, was offered for the first time this spring.
“The aim of the course is to give faculty the confidence that they can translate their face-to-face research into an online environment,” said Brian Redmond, the lead faculty member for organizational leadership at Penn State World Campus who helped create the course. Redmond said the ultimate goal is to create publishable research opportunities for students and faculty.
“We want to translate Penn State’s reputation for research into the online world,” he said.
Redmond said the impetus for creating the course was student demand.
“Penn State is a great research institution, and World Campus students have been asking for research opportunities," he said.
Online students can easily conduct many kinds of research, particularly in the social sciences and humanities, Redmond said. Lab kits can allow students in the physical sciences to do experiments at a distance and upload their results.
Redmond recently led a research project in which six World Campus students compared job postings for online and campus faculty positions. The research experience will be particularly important for students planning to attend graduate school, he said.
Redmond hopes to get more faculty members involved in offering research opportunities to online students — including faculty who may never have taught online.
“We are hoping this will encourage them to research with undergraduates online — not necessarily teach online,” he said.
The four-week course includes practical information such as creating a research or grant proposal. Each faculty member develops their own action plan.
“We’re not telling them what to research or how to research,” Redmond said. “We’re trying to give them the skills so they can translate their research online.”
Nine faculty members took the first four-week course, and Redmond said many of them planned to implement the ideas they developed into their fall courses.
For more information go to http://wcfd.psu.edu/.