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[WantsAJob]

I am about to finish my Ph.D. and am aiming for a community-college faculty position. I have acquired as much teaching experience as possible, but I am completing my Ph.D. at a foreign institution where the teaching opportunities are limited. I am considering taking an online course on how to create online courses, as I think this might make me look better to community colleges. However, these courses seem highly variable in both cost and length, with the cheapest starting at $250 and going up to the tens of thousands. Being a graduate student, this is a lot of money, but something I would consider if it would significantly improve my job prospects.  

Does anyone have any input as to whether this is worth it financially, and, if so, can anyone suggest good programs?

Thanks.

[Anon]

You might consider simply enrolling in a community-college distance-education course, analyzing how it's set up, then creating a course plan/syllabus that would conform to distance-education requirements. Also, investigate two major distance-education platforms: BlackBoard and WebCT, which a lot of the community colleges use.  

Types and contents of distance-education courses vary broadly. Some courses are fairly simple in design, such that they could even be completed via correspondence (as some actually are); others are much more complicated, requiring participation in chatrooms, bulletin boards, responses to other students' postings, group assignments via e-mail and instant messaging, log-ins to external sites with monitored exercises, etc.  

Some instructors and administrators confuse utilization of various electronic modalities with effective instruction.  The extent to which this confusion occurs, and the type of distance-education courses you will be required to design, ultimately will depend on the particular institution at which you are employed. Hence, if you have some familiarity with distance-education courses, and can lay claim to having designed materials for such courses, you will be able to adapt your experience to that of the particular institution, which will most likely provide its own training and software support.  

I would hesitate to spend too much time or money becoming expert in one particular type of distance education, or one particular software program, which might not be utilized at the institution where you are ultimately employed.

[B.F.]

If you were hired at my institution you would then be given the training for free. I would not recommend doing the training in advance. You can instead mention your willingness to teach online when applying for jobs. Also, you do not now know whether the school you will teach at uses Blackboard or WebCT, so you will not know which one to learn.

[DJ]

I too am completing my Ph.D, and my dissertation topic is online learning ... . I have been an online student and so see it from another persepctive. While I don't think you need to spend $250 on a course (most of these are taught by technologically-minded individuals and not necessarily educators), I would recommend a $20 purchase -- a book. I've read just about everything there is about how to teach online, so can recommend the best. There are two books written by Rena M. Palloff and Keith Pratt. One book is titled, Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace and the other is [/i]The Virtual Student.[/i] I highly recommend either of these.

While they won't give you actual online teaching experience, you will learn the lingo and have a reasonable grasp on the problems, issues and possible solutions to the challenges of online learning and teaching.  This would help you in an interview situation. I hope this helps.