Creating Online Lessons: A Faculty Development Seminar Series

The World Wide Web is being used increasingly to deliver instruction in medical education. Consequently, there is a need to train faculty in developing and implementing online instruction. We developed and implemented a seminar series to teach faculty to create educationally sound, well-designed online instruction. Instruction was delivered to 15 participants via a six-session seminar on developing web-based lessons, supplemented with web-based instruction. First, the participants learned the basics of instructional design via a web-based module. They then completed content outlines for their online lessons prior to the first seminar. Lesson development, web site development and the use of a web-based instructional shell to imp lement the online lessons were each taught in two two-hour sessions. Eight participants developed online lessons and four actually implemented them. Feedback was mostly positive, with suggestions for improvement. All eight participants who completed the series said they would recommend it to their colleagues. Because a longitudinal workshop type of seminar series requires a large amount of participant time outside of class, a six-month seminar series may be too long. It is important at the beginning of the series to help participants select topics suitable for online instruction and to help them narrow their topics. We may change the attendance guidelines so faculty would attend only the session on instructional design and have their staff attend the technical sessions on web site design, HTML editing and online course delivery systems. This would better match the actual practice of faculty designing the instruction and staff developing it.