Game changers: developing graduate faculty for a technology-rich  (Page 3/14)

Dialogue around these changes is imperative for deepening our readiness for promising practices in online learning. We are reinventing ourselves, refusing to sacrifice our high program standards of education as we work closely together to invigorate our graduate leadership programs at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG). We use existing and emerging technologies such as video conferencing, blogs, wikis, and electronic portfolios that have educational relevance for helping us to address “the changes envisaged for society in the next decades” (Hyatt&Williams, 2010, p. 55). But, we want to be mindfully critical of the influences that are shaping our work, and we also want to have the power and autonomy to monitor those monitoring us. Where purposefully utilized, online learning provides not only the challenge but also the opportunity to be cutting-edge, future-oriented, and empowered. Projecting outward to the mid-century, learning technologies may be inextricably bound to standardized accountability goals, but creativity and entrepreneurial learning cannot be highly controlled, and students will not be obedient subjects (English, et al., in press). Learning technologies will allow for much more dynamic learning interactions that reflect new “literacies of power,” with students in the driving seat of learning and innovation (Creighton, 2011).

Exploring faculty professional development in technology-infused learning

The educational leadership program that we focus on here is a fully online Specialist in Education (EdS) in educational leadership, commonly known as the 6th year degree, which is selective with respect to student eligibility and experimental regarding pedagogical delivery, team approach, and partnerships with schools, districts, consortia, and agencies. While the traditional version of this program has long existed and remains active and popular, the fully online version was launched in Fall 2011 after a year of planning for innovation. State funding, school district-university partnerships, and cross-departmental collaboration are supporting the 2-year EdS online program that is statewide and cohort-friendly. IMPACT V (formally IMPACT V: "Building 21st Century School Leadership") is a fifth in a series of instructional technology projects in North Carolina supported with state and federal funding by the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI). The intent of IMPACT V is to build leadership capacity in the State's middle and high schools with the highest need, as captured in Figure 1.

Figure 1. IMPACT V Model

While we continue to face myriad hurdles—programmatic, ethical, strategic, and institutional—to the implementation of this new program, we have tasked ourselves with rising to each and every challenge together as seasoned professors and practitioners alike to proactively “anticipat[e] issues that need to be addressed” (Hackmann&McCarthy, 2011, p. 284). Most of the literature on online/virtual programs is geared toward adapting the environment for today’s learners and on pedagogical breakthroughs and barriers as well as institutional challenges (Cornelius, Gordon,&Ackland, 2011; Orr, Williams,&Pennington, 2009; Park&Choi, 2009; Sansone, Fraughton, Zachary, Butner,&Heiner, 2011).