Since its inception, IHETS has been a forum for members to develop their own capacity and collaborate to support faculty in ways that represent best practice and can also be relevant to institutional reward structures: competitive grants secured, conference presentations, awards, and occasional publications that can be meaningful for promotion and tenure review. In the belief that greater familiarity with the work of colleagues at sister institutions helps strengthen collegial working relationships and trust-building in support of improved transfer and articulation among institutions, many of IHETS’ faculty services have been intended to create opportunities for exchanges of experience.

Program development grants

Through IHETS, the Indiana Partnership for Statewide Education (IPSE) for several years made modest grants on a competitive basis to assist creative faculty with developing new learning modules or courses for asynchronous delivery to learners. Through related materials, IHETS seeks to help proposers strengthen their ability to prepare high-quality grant proposals not only for the IHETS program but for other purposes as well.

Conferences

IHETS has also supported faculty development through jointly planned conferences. The annual IPSE All Partners Conference provided a vehicle for faculty and instructional support staff to exchange best practices and lessons learned in an interdisciplinary, interinstitutional context. As with the grants program, the All Partners Conference breakout and poster sessions were competitively selected. Through the human network of instructional support staff, several campuses have also opened their own faculty-development workshops to faculty from other institutions. The All Partners Conference was discontinued in 2006-07.

Awards

In spring 2002 IHETS launched a set of IPSE Awards to recognize innovative faculty and instructional support staff. The Faculty Services Team evaluated dozens of nominations annually in each of three categories: Innovation in Teaching in a Distance Education Program, Innovation in Use of Technology for Teaching (which can include campus-based classes as well as distance classes), and Innovation in Instructional Support. The Awards program was discontinued in 2006-07.

Reference documents

A useful reference for faculty and institutions is the Guiding Principles for Faculty in Distance Education, which identifies commonly valued best practices as a benchmark for members in designing, developing, delivering, supporting, and assessing their own course and degree offerings via technology.

In 1997 IHETS published a peer-reviewed compilation of faculty articles under the title Beginnings: Initial Experiences in Teaching via Distance Education, and in 1998 IHETS published a follow-up volume of faculty papers around the theme Enhancements: How Using Technology Changes What Faculty Do. Though both books are out of print, they can be downloaded from this Web site for educational uses.