Impacts of faculty professional development on online course design in community colleges in three northeastern states

Many colleges now provide professional development opportunities for faculty who design and develop online courses for delivery in leading course management systems like Blackboard(TM), WebCT(TM) and Moodle. There is little research on the impact of professional development on faculty design of online courses at community colleges. This quantitative, correlational, descriptive study explored whether exposure to basic instructional design principles and constructivist-based best practices resulted in faculty who identified with these practices when designing the course experience. The study included institutional information from 10 community colleges in three northeastern states (New Jersey, Maryland, and Pennsylvania). Two surveys were deployed, one to the college's institutional contact and the other to the online faculty members. The results from 54 faculty members revealed that while faculty identified with many of the basic instructional design principles and utilized them in designing their course, there was far less support for some constructivist based best practices. Correlations were conducted to view differences between faculty's view of professional development, their perceptions of constructivist instructional strategy and their adoption of basic instructional design standards and whether these statistics varied by demographic category. Among the findings, an inverse relationship between time teaching online and professional development was discovered along with much higher professional development ratings from part-time faculty in comparison to full-time faculty. This study also looked at the variance in the professional development opportunities across community colleges. The findings establish a better understanding of these issues in the context of faculty's perceptions of their online course design.