It sounds like your project is making many of the resources and presentations from the workshops available to a virtual audience. What have you found to be the trade-offs, challenges, or affordances associated with virtual participation vs. in-person?

This is a brand new project so we don’t know much yet about how well the virtual version does or does not work. One advantage of the in-person version of the New Faculty Workshop is that participants have set aside three days to be immersed in the experience, so they really make time to get involved. We created an online version because not everyone can make time to attend in person, and we wanted to make these workshops, which have been hugely beneficial to participants, available to a wider audience. I think the biggest challenge we will face is that it’s just much harder for people to motivate themselves to spend an hour watching a presentation if they aren’t there in person, even if they are interested. One way to address this challenge could be to have local groups of faculty who get together in person to watch and discuss these presentations.

I’m excited to see this workshop go online – but I can certainly see the challenges to getting folks to devote time to watching the videos!
I am wondering if you think the videos and associated hand-outs/materials will be useful to faculty who participate in person. I know we usually recommend “just try one thing” to begin. The videos could also provide an opportunity for faculty to go back, and revisit a teaching approach when they are ready to try it or when they are moving onto a specific course – like upper division instruction.
I know its perhaps beyond the scope of your project, but what about also providing a 4 minute teaser … that gives some of the basics and then the longer full workshop session with everything?
How are you going to track impact?

In our project, we have used both in-person and online workshops. Although it is frequently impractical, we have found that on-line PD works best if you can have some (even limited) person-to-person interaction prior to the on-line asynchronous PD. Is it feasible for youo to have such person-to-person interaction prior to the online PD?

Am I understanding correctly that the idea is to make videos of the live sessions and associated materials available online? Are there plans to adapt the materials at all to make online use more effective/efficient? Will there be some sort of supports developed for those who choose to view the materials online?

I am glad you are running this project because I would like 100% of the new faculty to have this experience.
It seems to me that faculty are better able to handle long presentations than students. Nevertheless, they must have some limit to their attention span. Will you edit the presentation videos down to, say, eight to ten-minute segments that will seem easy to digest in a single session?

Interesting idea but we would have to redo the videos to fit that format. The current workshop sessions involve interactive engagement parts as well as short presentations by the leaders. Nevertheless, we might think of having short segments, each of which then has an engagement piece attached to it.