When Houston Community College transitioned to online instruction for the remainder of the Spring 2020 school year, faculty member and Chancellor’s Excellence Award winner, Richard Gosselin (Economics), stepped forward with a framework to help other faculty through the transition. He built a Canvas course shell, called “Faculty Video Lounge.” He invited faculty members who had been teaching online for several years—he calls them “Canvas Power Users”—to provide online instruction for other faculty members less familiar with Canvas in their transition to online.
Faculty instructors use Kaltura Live Rooms or Cisco Webex to conduct live web conferences with other faculty. Professor Gosselin creates a schedule with hourly time slots running Monday through Friday, 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM. Each faculty-instructor has “teacher” status in the course, so they can launch, manage, and record a live session at any time. Faculty-students simply log in to the Kaltura Live Room at the scheduled time to participate in the web conference.
Since the launch of this site on March 16,
- 761 faculty have joined the course as students
- 23 faculty are identified as teachers
- 20 faculty provide at least one weekly workshop
- As of April 6, there are 47 sessions scheduled for the week.
Topics covered include: using online meeting platforms, making better PowerPoints, designing Canvas quizzes, building better assignments, other assessment strategies, communicating with students, managing emails, interactive games and quizzes, accessibility and captioning, using Canvas SpeedGrader, curbing plagiarism and other forms of cheating, various video recording strategies, and so on.
This is a phenomenal example of creative, crowd-sourced, peer mentoring and professional development. Thanks to Professor Gosselin’s leadership and the hard work of the many faculty instructors as well as the many faculty willing to improve their skills, the transition to online has a real potential to transform teaching and learning at Houston Community College.
Location: Houston, TX, USA
More Information: Houston Community College EduTube Video Platform
Portia Tinnermon
Richard and the rest of our faculty are doing an incredible job in sharing all of the fabulous workshops! have learned so much and I thank them for the time and effort put into these GREAT workshops! Excellent!!!!