TRANSITION OF CLASSES FOR A FLEXIBLE ENVIRONMENT
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Performance System
Description of the Organization Small Hill Community College is a college located in the municipality of a city, in Indiana. This college serves several surrounding areas. Seventy percent of the faculty are adjunct professors. Thirty percent of the faulty are full-time. The college has been popular with new high school graduates, high school graduates, and professionals who want to increase their skills. In recent years, the enrollment numbers have been declining. At first, this was due to an economic recession and the college leadership waited for a better economy, to see an enrollment increase. What became more evident was that the “unhappiness,” of the whole college was the student body, who were already attending the college. The Board of Trustees decided to request a committee to view the situation and gather solutions. One major solution that was given included, a “transition to providing online and blended classes,” for student flexibility and needs. The resolution was to offer all core classes online and to continue to offer in-person classes, for a five-year time period. The college elected to use full-time faculty to move classes to an online format. The college used a large amount of funding to support the design and execute the online classes. When the fourth year of the program came, only 27% of the courses were updated to being online classes. Since the full-time faculty were to work on the transition of the classes to being online classes; the complete goals for full-time faculty were not being met. The team of educational technologists and the IT department responded by reaffirming that the faculty were not updated with sufficient technology skills or knowledge of how to teach online. The college worked on providing workshops for expounding technology skills. In addition, the college continued by expounding with online teaching demonstrations. The training evaluations showed results that now, the faculty was “unhappy,” with the technology training. The faculty saw the training as being sketchy and not scaffolded. However, the technology team did not feel that the majority of faculty were equipped to work on the process to transition classes to online classes. Only 30%, of those who took part in the workshops, tried to work on the online class transition process. Next, nearly half of those finished the transition. The Provost of the Small Hill Community College went to a conference that encompassed the “Innovation Theory,” (Rogers, 1995). As a result, the Provost of the college concluded that the majority of the faculty are moderate with changes. With this in mind, the Provost concurred with the technology team that skill faculty skill levels and attitudes of the faculty were hindrances to the technology acquisition. As a result, the Provost put in motion a comprehensive training design. With reflection on Small Hill Community College, HPT specialists were approached for online class innovation.
Adapted from Training Ain’t Performance, pg. 30 by Stolovitch, H.D. &Keeps, E.J.(2004). Alexandria, VA: ASTD Press
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