Northcentral University

20 | Faculty Teaching Responsibilities | NCU Faculty Handbook SECTION 3: FACULTY TEACHING RESPONSIBILITIES Teaching Through Engagement Model and Best Practices for Teaching in the Online Environment Northcentral University has an established pedagogical model with a supporting set of best practice principles for distance education. The principles are consistent with those long-established in the field of distance education and with NCU's Teaching Through Engagement (TTE) pedagogical model. Adhering to these guidelines helps ensure faculty and student engagement and promote success in the online environment. To best serve the working adult population identified in the University's Mission, NCU utilizes Knowles' (2014) Principles of Andragogy. In this model, there are six essential principles applied to adult learning: 1) Involved Adult Learners - Adults need to be involved in the planning and evaluation of their instruction. 2) Problem-Centered - Adult learning is problem-centered rather than content-oriented (Kearsley, 2010). 3) Adult Learners' Experience - Experience (including mistakes) provides the basis for the learning activities. 4) Relevance & Impact to Learners' Lives - Adults are most interested in learning subjects that have immediate relevance and impact to their job or personal life. 5) Orientation to Learning - Adults are motivated to learn to the extent that learning whatever material desired will help them perform tasks at a greater efficiency or will help deal with problems they confront in their life situations. In addition, adults are more prominent when learning new knowledge, understandings, skills, values, and attitudes when they are presented in the perspective of applying the information to real-life situations. 6) Motivation - Adults are quick to respond to motivators such as better jobs, promotions within jobs and higher salaries for working the jobs; but the most effective motivators are internal pressures such as the desire for increased job satisfaction, self-esteem, quality of life, and the like. NCU also embraces the engagement theory where students must be meaningfully engaged in learning activities through interaction with others and worthwhile tasks (Kearsley & Schneiderman, 1999). This theory sits at the heart of NCU's Statement on TTE: Engagement is an authentic interaction that uses technology to facilitate genuine, systematic, and substantive dialogue before, during and after the creation and/or application of scholarship. Engagement can take many forms, but in our online context, it specifically relates to interactions among faculty and students in either faculty to student or student-to-student forums. With these theories in mind, NCU faculty embrace the following principles for online teaching: • Principle #1: Be Present • Principle #2: Provide Clear Expectations • Principle #3: Engage Students Early and Often • Principle #4: Provide Effective Feedback • Principle #5: Help Students be Successful Learners • Principle #6: Use Content Resources That Are Available in Digital Format • Principle #7: Combine Core Concept Learning with Customized and Personalized Learning

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