Promoting instructional quality: Templates and training for online teaching

Instructional quality is increasingly becoming a concern in distance learning. There is consensus that interaction, particularly cognitive engagement and social engagement, affects online quality. This paper presents the use of templates and their integration into faculty training as strategies for achieving quality in online courses. Two types of templates will be presented: templates for establishing online learning community (social engagement) and templates for higher-order thinking skills (cognitive engagement). These are integrated into a faculty-training program that uses two instructional design models: present-engage-assess-reflect, and, outcomes-setup-facilitate-assess. This gives faculty the option to select what best suits their teaching style, and helps assure that templates are not used in isolation.