Proposal abstract :
Though 2/3 of students at The Seattle School now participate in online, low-residency programs and classes, most of our faculty have not had the experience of being a student in an online class. Faculty are trying to develop as online instructors, but without the experience of being an online student, or even the imagination for what effective online learning–asynchronous learning in particular–can look and feel like from a learner’s perspective. We seek to use Wabash grant funds for a project that has faculty enrolling in interest-based, online, asynchronous classes of their choosing in order to: ignite faculty imagination towards creating interesting, accessible, and high-quality asynchronous learning content, cultivate empathy for the learner’s experience in an online classroom, provide time/opportunity/resources for faculty to think metacognitively about their own teaching practice, and participate in a Community of Practice to help apply those learnings to their own course design