The Great Resignation has impacted many industries including higher education, leaving many institutions scrambling to pick up the pieces. Attend this session to learn how to withstand the Great Resignation and save your faculty development programs from an unpredictable fate.
Relevance to the Community
Process documentation is often overlooked when it relates to higher education faculty development programs. However, proper documentation of key faculty development administrative and facilitation processes can be integral to a program’s success. Effective documentation of faculty development programs may include artifacts that describe in detail the program’s goals, design, and outcomes; enrollment, administration, facilitation, maintenance, and revision processes; and training and orientation guides for program facilitators and trainers.
There are numerous benefits to proper faculty development program documentation. By recording key processes and standards of procedures, program administrators can ensure consistency and the seamless continuation of services during periods of employee transitions. Faculty turnover is not uncommon in Higher Education and institutions have seen increases since the global pandemic, which started in 2020. This can oftentimes prove detrimental to a program’s success and lead to interruptions in an institution’s ability to support and sustain its faculty development programs. However, effective documentation can work to minimize such interruptions in program offerings and allow alternate individuals to step in and maintain the program while also ensuring that important processes are preserved.
Detailed and efficient documentation also promotes efficiency and problem-solving by providing key stakeholders with a global vantage point of a faculty development program, allowing them to identify gaps and inefficiencies and develop a strategy to resolve them. An often-contributing factor to the longevity of a faculty development program is workload. Programs are often retired or phased out because the administrative and facilitation workload to maintain them is not sustainable. Having a detailed outline of facilitator expectations and duties can allow administrators to identify inefficiencies and work to streamline them, reducing the administrative workload and improving efficiency.
In this presentation, we will share how proper documentation was able to help a large higher education institution maintain continuity of its faculty development programming amidst the resignation of key university personnel and a pandemic that impacted personnel attendance and continuation of employment. Several faculty development administration and logistics documentation templates will also be provided.
Session Takeaways
Participants of the session will be able to identify strategies for effective documentation of faculty development programs. Attendees will leave with several faculty development administration and logistics documentation templates as well as instructions to access a faculty development companion course template available for free via Canvas Commons.
Gamified Session Plan
We will share this presentation through gamification. Below is a detailed plan of the session.
Game Title: Doc Crusades Premise: This session will be modeled after popular adventure crusades such as Indiana Jones, where participants will embark on a variety of adventures to unlock the secrets to proper faculty development documentation. Participants will be split into explorer groups and compete to be the first to unearth hidden secrets. Throughout the game, participants will be exposed to important concepts that illustrate how proper documentation was able to help a large higher education institution maintain continuity of its faculty development programming amidst the resignation of key university personnel.Game Plan: The participants will be divided into explorer groups of 5-6 people. Each group of explorers will embark on different adventures. Once a team successfully completes an adventure, an important secret will be unlocked, during which aspects of the presentation will be revealed by one of the expedition leaders (presenters).