Faculty Professional Learning: An Examination of Online Development and Assessment Environments - Teaching through Multi-User Virtual Environments - page 77

effective form of training when compared
to campus-wide seminars or departmental
training programs (Jones, 1993)' (Boyle, &
Boice, 1998, p. 158). Also, considerate it is
evident that collaboration is more effective
than having each faculty member go off to do
her teaching duties in isolation. Accordingly,
Driscoll et al. (2009, p. 7) found that “Group
mentoring programs to support women and
minority faculty in their career goals include
strategic collaboration”. Anyway, it is also
difficult to find either a head of department
or experienced faculty members from the
same department to represent the functions
of educator, sponsor, coach, counselor and
confronter. This is why some authors claim
or imply that participating in the varying
characteristics of different types of men-
toring relationships promotes significant
knowledge gains for junior faculty members
and women: “Cross-institution mentoring
programs for women could be enhanced as
a means to avoid some of the political con-
straints of being mentored in one's academic
department” (Gibson, 2004, pp. 184-5).

or online courses across disciplines is not a simple
matter. Below we give some justifications.

(1) Faculty members are somehow skeptical
about some technological proposals. Some
instructors who have never used interac-
tive technologies, but who rely heavily on
constructivist learning methodologies (e.g.,
interpersonal collaboration that leads to
knowledge building) in traditional classes
are often skeptical of online interaction.
These instructors have an entrenched
perception that online courses deprive
students of meaningful interaction with
their peers. Such courses do, in fact, limit
students' oral interaction with their peers,
but online courses can provide them with
multiple opportunities, as discussed above,
for written interaction and discussion about
readings, assignments, and their writing and
reading processes, perhaps more so than in
traditional courses. As King (2002, p. 236)
has remarked: “Specifically, it was found
that these hybrid online classroom discus-
sions had the potential of prompting critical
thinking, dynamic interactive dialogue, and
substantial peer-to-peer interaction”.
(2) Recent research explores the complex links
between the design of online professional
development and FPL competences . We have
selected many of the features of professional
development in our online FPL. Thus, our
e-development programs include planning,
organizing, structuring, tracking, reporting,
communicating assessments, and many
other principles, that take time and require
orderliness on the part of the online program
advisers, which are critical issues in its de-
sign. Therefore, as others before us (see, for
example, Nijhuis & Collis, 2003), we have
designed faculty e-development programs
considering the following elements:

DeVeLOPINg TeACHINg AND
ASSeSSmeNT COmPeTeNCeS
IN A BLeNDeD eNVIRONmeNT

University administrations often advocate be-
coming a 'blended' university, one that enables
students to take online courses, traditional courses
and courses that are partly online either off or
on campus. However, many academic faculty
members do not see a need for blending courses,
or being part of the blended university which the
administration now apparently wants. The earlier
perception of online learning as distance learning
(i.e., courses delivered off-campus), or as part of a
distance learning program where all courses must
occur in virtual space, has contributed to their
reluctance. Of course, integrating web-enhanced