Foundations of Online Teaching

Short Courses

Applications are currently being accepted for this short course through Monday, April 7, 2025.

Description

Regardless of your online teaching experience, this facilitator-led course provides foundations and guidance for purposeful online course design, development, and delivery. The course is delivered through the Blackboard Learning Management System in a fully asynchronous format. Faculty work in the course as students and complete weekly activities and assignments. We do not recommend enrolling in this course if you have completed Getting Started Teaching Online at USC.

Offered with support from the Office of the Provost, the goal of this course is to support and develop a community of faculty prepared to develop and teach high-quality distributed learning courses. This course is offered fully online and does not have any required scheduled meeting times. Participants who complete the course will receive a certificate of completion. Any faculty member (tenure track, professional track, and adjunct) who teaches as an instructor of record on the Columbia campus, Palmetto College campuses, and the Schools of Medicine may apply.

By the end of the course, participants will be able to:

Recognize online learning best practices.
Create measurable learning outcomes and objectives.
Describe the role of alignment in online courses.
Apply quality standards for online courses.
Identify student and faculty support resources.
Collaborate and network with colleagues.
Create a syllabus for an online course.

Admission to this course is competitive and spaces are limited, so apply early. Applicants will be expected to complete 100 percent of the course activities and assignments to receive a certificate of completion.

Details

Foundations of Online Teaching will run for four weeks, starting on Thursday, May 8, 2025 and ending on Wednesday, June 4, 2025. Course activities and assignments must be completed satisfactorily on the course due dates.

Application

To apply, please complete the Application Form.

Application Deadline: Monday, April 7, 2025

For questions, please contact Gloria Washington at 803-777-7078 or [email protected].

About the Facilitator

Gloria Washington is an instructional designer at the Center for Teaching Excellence with 26 years of experience in higher education at the University of South Carolina. She is a Blackboard Certified Trainer and a Blackboard Exemplary Course Program Reviewer. Washington completed the Quality Matters’ Applying the QM Rubric and Higher Education Peer Reviewer courses. Before coming to CTE, she worked in Teaching and Technology Services and as a Technology Director for the Ted Mimms Foreign Language Learning Center. Washington serves as Associate Editor for the International Journal of Innovative Teaching and Learning in Higher Education and also authors the blog, Pedagogy Before Technology. She holds a Doctor of Education, a Master of Arts in Education, and a Master of Business Administration. Her expertise is in the pedagogical use of technology to support teaching and learning. Her instructional design philosophy is “pedagogy first, technology second.

This is a great resource to encourage best practices with online teaching, and I am grateful for the opportunity to participate. I really enjoyed how the assignments were directly related to what we would do for our courses. It was great to see examples from others and to know what the university requires/expects in terms of compliance, accessibility, etc.

Learning by doing really worked for me because it made me use technologies I had been afraid to try.

Having never taught online before, this was extremely helpful in getting me started. I know I will be revisiting most of the modules as I work my way through my first online teaching experience next semester. Glad I took this course!

I teach a hybrid course and am considering developing a corresponding online course. There was an abundance of useful information. Not only the technology available for course delivery, but teaching methodologies that work well with these types of courses. Also a lot of useful tips on keeping courses organized and reducing the amount of work necessary to deliver the course.

I thought that the course combined pedagogy and technology in very balanced and creative ways. The student-centered approaches I learned and the online tools to which I was introduced are invaluable and indeed largely applicable to both face-to-face and distance instruction.

Center for Teaching Excellence

Short Courses