With a Little Help From Your Students: A New Model for Faculty Development and Online Course Design

Institutions of higher education are faced with the challenge of developing faculty who are ready, willing, and able to teach online. Standard approaches towards faculty development often miss the dynamic and complex relationship between content, pedagogy, and technology. Our approach has faculty members and graduate students participate in a unique seminar where they work collaboratively to design online courses. We describe our “learning by design” approach and present evidence of how this approach respects the realities and complexities of teaching online. We use evidence from multiple sources (interviews, surveys, observations, and artifacts developed) to develop a model of online teaching that posits successful courses require the careful integration of three components that coconstrain each other: content, pedagogy, and technology. The late Douglas Adams (1997), author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, uncovered an important principle relevant to educational technology—The Someone Else’s Problem (SEP) field. The SEP is a fictional technology that can make something “virtually invisible” because we think it is somebody else’s problem. It is not that the object in question really vanishes. It does not. It may in fact even catch you by surprise out of the corner of your eye. The idea of the SEP is that once we consider something as being outside of the arena of our concerns, that something, for all practical