The project is faculty's lived experiences
teaching online courses, whether that's
a more traditional extension school, credit-bearing course,
or a Massive Open Online Course and what
they learn from the experience, how
it applies to their residential teaching and their research.
We've both worked with faculty for going on five years
now at HarvardX.
And there's a really great developed parts
of the organization and across university
that study student experiences taking courses.
But there's really-- it feels like a dearth of research
around faculty's experience teaching courses.
And we had both, anecdotally, in the courses
that we have managed, heard a lot of overlapping things,
both positive and also things faculty
wished they had known when they had started.
And we wanted to really formalize
that in using the Spark grant in a study design,
so that we could pull out these faculty experiences
to share with prospective faculty who
are thinking about developing online courses.
And also, staff and course developers
who are working with faculty to improve their experiences.
Some preliminary things we found are that across the board,
I think, faculty were surprised at how long it takes
to create an online course.
It's quite different than creating a residential course.
A lot of faculty transformed the way
they teach in their residential course based
on their experiences teaching online.
They tend to teach more interactively
after teaching online.
And also, a few them were able to work
on projects that were more interdisciplinary that they
otherwise wouldn't have a chance to do in a residential setting
and to collaborate with faculty that they wouldn't otherwise
collaborate with.
And some of them altered their research interests
and gave them a more global perspective
on those who are doing Massive Open Online Courses.
In some ways, we're still in the preliminary stages,
in the sense that the Spark grant helped
us get to the stage where we are now to start actually
using our time to go through what
has been coded to then determine a quasi-list of best practices.
And also, to turn around and present back to the university
is really important for what we're doing.
So while the grant is up, it doesn't
mean that the work that we're doing is done.
In some sense, it's pushed us to the next stage.
I think putting together a timeline early on
is really important.
Obviously, you want to leave yourself flexibility
as you explore and develop new ideas.
But in general, it's a grant, which
has a specific amount of time around it.
And you really want to know what your deliverable is
at the end Holt is very generous with giving us
the freedom of establishing our own goals.
But you still want to set those goals early on.
You don't want it to just be an exploratory space.
You really want to know what you're going into
and set internal deliverables to make
sure you've reached that goal.
The most valuable part of this grant was having a great coach.
Rebecca was amazing.
And just really having a sounding board and someone
to cheer lead us along and think through the process
was so helpful.
I think the process would not have been the same at all
without her.
I think she was, in some ways, even
more valuable than the money.
Yeah.
I'd totally sign off for that.
Rebecca, that's our coach, was very supportive and helpful
and I think emblematic, generally,
of what Holt represented for us, which was a support
structure when we needed it.
No one was poking around, asking us what were doing,
but if we needed help or support,
we knew that it was there, which was really, really
nice with this sort of grant.