Understanding that “yesterday’s home runs don’t win today’s games (Babe Ruth),” Coppin State University’s Instructional Technology Department redesigned its faculty development to heighten engagement, relevancy, impact, and efficiency. This session will highlight the redesign strategy, provide examples of redesigned faculty development activities, and discuss the impact of the redesign initiative.
Perhaps Leafstedt and Pacansky-Brock (2016) said it best: “Faculty development in higher education looks the same today as it did 30 years ago: educators attend face-to-face workshops and consultations in an attempt to find new strategies and ideas for improving learning.” This was Coppin State University. For years, faculty development was comprised of creating a schedule of sessions, placing faculty in a lab for hands-on training, and sending them on their way. Not only did this become mundane, it also impeded the cultivation of the type of faculty we needed to groom: faculty that would be innovative and focus on using technology to spur student success.
Over the past two years, the department took steps to redesign its faculty development. As a result of the redesign, we’ve seen an increase in faculty use of technology, comfort level of using technology, and greater integration of digital pedagogical principles in the curriculum. There’s also a greater level of satisfaction in the programming offered.
The redesign was rooted in current research, various campus data sources (i.e., course evaluations, course scheduling, technology usage reports, feedback from previous training sessions, etc.), student input, and faculty input. The redesign plan included:
1. Using data to drive training decisions.
2. Aligning training topics with core university goals.
3. Modeling techniques of innovative practices in faculty training.
4. Having executive sponsorship for faculty development.
5. Offering diverse options for attendance (online or face-to-face).
6. Incorporating digital badges.
7. Implementing new teaching and learning mechanisms (cohort model; hybrid learning; flipped learning; coaching and mentoring).
8. Redesigning faculty lab to an experiential, collaborative digital learning space.
9. Incentivizing development and recognizing faculty in a high-visibility way.
10. Making it fun.
This session will discuss the hallmarks of the redesign, show examples of activities, and provide evidence of the redesign’s impact.