What | asynchronous onboarding course with opportunities to schedule virtual meetings

Platform | Articulate Rise

Audience | new & returning adjunct faculty at the graduate & undergraduate levels

Experience | 10 years

From 2013-2019, I was solely responsible for onboarding new faculty in the MFA at Oregon State University - Cascades. These remote faculty worked long-distance, were never physically on campus, and struggled to connect to the institution and to navigate campus systems. My job was to welcome them to a community they would only experience virtually and to help them grow a support system so so I would not remain their sole point of contact with the institution.

From 2019-2023, I onboarded new faculty to teach in the Creative Writing program at the New College of Florida. Some of these faculty worked in-person and some worked remotely; my onboarding process had to accommodate both, and to connect both to the institutional mission, vision, and values.

Impact | Hard & Soft Goals

The ultimate institutional goal is employee retention.

My personal goal was seeding camaraderie amongst teaching faculty who would likely never meet each other, but who would need to commit to a shared vision in order for the Creative Writing Program to be a success.

The key to this project’s success was, in my opinion, my decision to be as transparent as possible, identifying out-dated systems and under-resourced offices. This way, faculty working long-distance wouldn’t waste their energy feeling frustrated, and could focus on the real work: which is offering an innovative, rigorous, interdisciplinary education to student writers.

Inspiration | The Revolution In Modern Learning

I read a lot of books as part of my personal crash course in instructional design, online learning, and brain science.

One of the most mind-blowing was Crystal Kadakia and Lisa M.D. Owens’ Designing for Modern Learning.

I relied Kadakia and Owen’s 8 elements of Modern Learning throughout the design process, revising my eLearning course until it satisfied all 8: accessible, autonomous, chunked, hyperlinked, experiential, personalized, multimedia, and social.

Tools | Articulate Rise, Prezi, Loom, Slack