The evolution of online faculty development workshops over the past four years at West Virginia University is described in this paper. The workshop platforms included Blackboard Vista and Wimba Classroom. Additionally, a workshop on Turnitin was given.

The major difficulty seems to lie in gaining faculty participation. No workshop had more than 22 faculty members in attendance. The authors conclude that the best procedures would be to structure the content to fit half-days face-to-face, to complete the development of a workshop before the workshop begins, to limit workshops to two weeks, to announce the workshops through the Provost’s Office, and to use email to remind participants.

Details of the workshops are described. This paper would be of strong interest to those organizing or refining online faculty development efforts. General readers would not likely be interested because it is hard to see how the conclusions can be generalized.