Examination of Faculty Development to Promote Effective Blended Courses

Abstract

With the aim of promoting blended courses at the university, we conducted a survey to investigate the situation of such courses that were conducted in the fall semester of 2020 and examined future possibilities of faculty development (FD) by implementing an FD seminar, which we developed based on the suggestions obtained from the survey. The findings were as follows. (1) In the blended courses, online synchronous (real-time) class activities were mainly conducted while online asynchronous (on-demand) activities were limited. (2) Although the “online active learning skill” to provide active learning in online classes (Abe et al., 2022) was highly correlated with real-time class activities, it was not applied to on-demand instruction. (3) The FD seminar that focused on blending synchronous (face-to-face) and asynchronous (on-demand) activities consisting of lectures, individual work, and question-and-answer sessions could greatly improve the knowledge of blended course design. Additionally, it was suggested that more efforts are needed to link FD to classroom practice.