By: Craig Piercy, Ph.D.

It seems like only yesterday since we first planned to move our Master of Internet Technology online. It’s hard to believe that we will be graduating our first cohort of fully online students in May 2016.

We had been operating in various modes since 2000: face-to-face (f2f) full-time, f2f part-time, and hybrid part-time. So, when the UGA administration put out the call to propose new online programs a few years ago, it seemed only natural for the Master of Internet Technology program to take advantage of the very platform that we were mastering and move fully online.

From the beginning, we have been dedicated to delivering the online Master of Internet Technology program at the same level of quality as we did during our previous program incarnations. A primary question was: “How do we help our instructors make the transition to online?” Our instructors, drawn from the award winning faculty of the Terry College of Business’ MIS department and from leading industry practitioners, were very experienced in delivering quality courses in our primarily f2f format. We decided that training was the answer.

Looking around, we found the Online Learning Consortium (formerly, known as The Sloan Consortium). The OLC has been a leader in training educators for online instruction for two decades. Our goal was to require all of our instructors to complete the OLC foundation course and encourage as many who were willing to complete the certification requirements.

Some core lessons learned from the OLC foundation course include:

• The online training provided guidance on how to approach student engagement when an instructor will perhaps never see their student in a f2f setting.
• We explored and gained experience with many online tools that can be used to help students engage with important course content.
• The OLC courses provided strategies for building relationships between distant students.
• Instructors were able to explore more deeply topics of interest through their electives such as: online group work, effective use of rigor, and video creation.

To a person, our instructors have enjoyed the training. Here are just a few of their comments:

• “We have often worked to update our knowledge as subject matter experts. This has been a great opportunity to update the practices we use on a day-to-day basis in the classroom.” – Jeff Howells
• “I was a little nervous about teaching online for the first time. The OLC training provided me with a comfortable place to start.” – Dr. Marie-Claude Boudreau

As of this writing, we can claim that we are 100 percent trained and 29 percent certified by OLC as online instructors. Two of our number, Dr. Marie-Claude Boudreau and myself, have been certified. As our first full cohort of online students completes the program, we will be evaluating our next moves to level up our knowledge of online instruction. Continuous quality improvement for the Master of Internet Technology program includes continued, periodic training for our instructors.

Dr. Craig Piercy has been the director of the Master of Internet Technology program since 2006. As an instructor and the chief administrator for the program, he led the initiative to move the program from a hybrid delivery format to a fully online program.