Faculty Spotlight
May - June 2004: Shu-Li Chen
The Importance of Good Training
Dr. Chen's enthusiasm for online learning was born, in part, during her tenure with the University of Phoenix, one of the nation's largest and most successful online education ventures. She was recruited in 2002 by the U of P, which at the time was actively seeking teaching faculty who were also experienced nursing practitioners. The application process, she remembers, was the "longest job interview I ever had," and it was followed by a full ten weeks of intensive training: the first four focused on the technology itself; the last six were devoted to Web-enabled teaching of nursing, specifically. That two-pronged approach to online learning is one key to the U of P's success, Dr. Chen said.Dr. Chen also benefited from the U of P's tightly structured mentoring process, through which she received a constant stream of constructive feedback from a more experienced colleague. That ongoing evaluation process allowed her to monitor the effectiveness of her teaching strategies in real time and to adjust them accordingly. Because of its unique status-degrees can be earned on campus, completely online, or in a combination of the two-the U of P also has the advantage of being able to cap class enrollments at twelve, which is impractical (if not impossible) for most traditional universities, but which has a great impact on the quality of online learning.