Dear Colleagues,
Now that pandemic restrictions are lifted, we must adhere to requirements from our regulatory organizations when offering online courses. This will affect all people serving as instructors-of-record for online courses, including online summer courses. If you plan to teach an online course during summer 2023, you must complete a 45-minute workshop (in-person or self-paced online) to augment the Hybrid Certification that you received during the pandemic, by January 2023. Additional workshops are needed if you do not have the Hybrid Certification. All workshops are required for new faculty.
I will briefly address the why below and refer you to Faculty Resources–eFaculty 2.0 (provost.tcu.edu/faculty-resources/efaculty-2-0) for more details. Registration will be available soon on the Koehler Center website.
Before the pandemic, eFaculty Certification by the Koehler Center was required for faculty teaching online courses. This was a very robust, yet time-consuming, program.
At the onset of the pandemic, the Koehler Center developed Hybrid Certification to quickly develop a reasonable skill set for delivering online courses. All faculty participated in this during summer 2020.
Moving forward, we will resume robust professional development, but within a very streamlined method.
I asked Dr. Fran Huckaby, associate provost of faculty affairs who now oversees the Koehler Center, and Dr. Sunny Farhadi, director of online and distance learning at the Koehler Center, to take a thoughtful approach to our previous professional development and create a process to ensure that TCU meets required regulations of SACSCOC and SARA, as well as new regulations that are coming from the Department of Education.
I am pleased to announce that our new requirement for teaching online courses, eFaculty 2.0, will be offered in five, short, 45-minute workshops. You may choose whether to participate in person or online at your own pace. eFaculty 2.0 will replace the previous time-consuming eFaculty Certification and Hybrid Certification, keeping the best information on the technical aspects and adding the unique skills needed to engage with students in an online course.
All eFaculty 2.0 workshops will be available in person and self-paced online beginning October 2022. The deadline to complete one or all, as required, is January 27, 2023. Registration and more information will be available soon on the Koehler Center website.
I thank Drs. Huckaby and Farhadi for their great work to simplify this process. I appreciate the work of our faculty and others serving as instructors for your support of quality education online and on campus.
Best,
Teresa Abi-Nader Dahlberg
Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs