003

03 11/24/2009 2:24:17

General Session - Conference Presentation Only (no formal paper)

//Rebecca Owens, Ednak, USA,// //becky@ednak.com// ** = = The Faculty community is as important as the student community in an online education environment. Faculty need a place to call their own, where they can share best practices, tips and resources, discuss issues and current trends and topics, share job leads, and feel as though they are part of something.
 * Building Faculty Community to Ensure Faculty and Student Success

In its simplest terms, ednak is a community dedicated to best practices and knowledge sharing related to online educational excellence. The ednak community is completely free and the core focus of the network is sharing ideas and insights with other online faculty / educators. The community can be found at www.ednak.com.

The ednak community was started with the sole aspiration to be a prime destination for online faculty / educators looking to strengthen their online teaching skills, connect with other online faculty, and enhance their overall effectiveness as online educators. As one ednak member recently stated:

“For me, this ednak community is perfect because, unfortunately, I don't have many colleagues in my department who teach online. . . and it’s often challenging for me to find others to commiserate with or to bounce ideas off of. I think it's great that we can all have opportunities to connect and learn from each other and perhaps even collaborate on projects.”

This session will discuss the importance of a faculty community and how ednak captures the need for such a community by This session will discuss the importance of faculty community. It will also discuss how ednak has captured that need and is serving the needs of online faculty all over the world in many ways through discussions, webinars, job leads, and networking, and many more.

Participants will walk away from this session with:

1. An understanding of the importance of community for faculty 2. Examples of how community has enhanced the success of faculty and ultimately students 3. Ideas and concrete examples of how institutions can create community amongst their faculty

All Audiences faculty development online teaching alton colt ednak colt.alton@ednak.com