In fall 2002, CNDLS was awarded the Department of Education’s Fund for Improvement in Post Secondary Education Comprehensive Program grant to design and develop innovative faculty development models that allow faculty from different institutions to collaborate on student-centered curricular design projects. The grant enabled CNDLS to extend and deepen its faculty development programs centered on online collaborations, enhanced pedagogy, and technology. The grant’s two main goals were to develop excellent models of faculty development at all institutional levels and build content-focused, digital, curriculum resources and descriptive metadata models.

To achieve these ends, CNDLS designed an online faculty seminar that integrates course design issues with the scholarship of teaching and learning—the Crossroads Online Institute. Crossroads seeks to fill a need for professional development in a higher education setting that accommodates hectic faculty schedules while delivering quality materials and facilitation. Participants in the online seminar took part in an 8-week, virtual workshop in which they collaboratively redesigned activities to develop desired student skills. As a result of this process, faculty engaged in critical reflection on their own teaching, internalizing a design process for subsequent activities or courses. They conducted research on their own teaching and classrooms, collaborated across disciplines, and provided alternative perspectives to their peers on course development.

The findings are made public to other faculty in various disciplines, in order to advance best practices, by developing an extended online poster about their work. The nature of being public and sharing one’s work, beyond the classroom, is at the heart of the Crossroads Online Institute. The online poster initiates the grant’s second goal of building digital resources. Ultimately, CNDLS hopes to create a repository in which activities and instructor reflections developed out of the seminar will then be stored digitally for future scholars of teaching and learning. For the purpose of the repository, CNDLS asks seminar participants and other faculty to link their online posters to the FIPSE site, which hosts a secure database of faculty projects that will form a resource for future faculty.

The project builds on earlier projects, such as JesuitNet and the Visible Knowledge Project, that incorporate innovative approaches to collaborative or online faculty development. To view more information about the seminar and how to get involved, visit the Crossroads Online Institute website or contact CNDLS.