The Balancing Act

Abstract

Upon hearing a multitude of complaints from faculty members about the required training module prior to teaching online courses at Great Plains University for the first time, the instructional designers at GPU's North Central Campus decided to work with a faculty fellow to create a local version of the training. Before discussing specific modifications to the training module, the group delved into the interpersonal aspects of the relationship between instructional designers and faculty members in higher education. They suspected that these relationship dynamics had something to do with the shortcomings of the existing training module, and they wanted to ensure that they addressed them in the new version of the training. The result was a set of recommendations sent to the Provost at NCC that aligned the modifications to the training intervention to the performance problems in the institution, while simultaneously accounting for the interpersonal aspects identified in their discussions.