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Goal: Invest in Faculty and Staff Leadership

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Saved by PBworks
on November 5, 2007 at 9:04:57 pm

Goal:

To invest in faculty and staff so they can provide leadership for the College's transformation.

Challenge:

We train staff and faculty on technology but we often treat it as enforcement, rather than empowering them to lead. We need to encourage to innovate in their use of technology, rather than simply comply with set systems.

Additionally, faculty that do take innovative approaches are often not rewarded by the current system. As the Educause 2007 report notes:

Academic review and faculty rewards are increasingly out of sync with new forms of
scholarship. The trends toward digital expressions of scholarship and more interdisciplinary
and collaborative work continue to move away from the standards of traditional peer-reviewed
paper publication. New forms of peer review are emerging, but existing academic practices
of specialization and long-honored notions of academic status are persistent barriers to the
adoption of new approaches. Given the pace of change, the academy will grow more out of step
with how scholarship is actually conducted until constraints imposed by traditional tenure and
promotion processes are eased.

Approach:

While ensuring base-level compliance with certain enterprise software is important, we also need to focus on empowering and assisting those faculty who are taking the leadership roles in innovative use of technology. We need to support a culture of experimentation and smart risk-taking. Part of this is encouraging them to use free Web 2.0 solutions available and training them in them, so that they can roll thier own solutions -- part of this is embracing the current shift technology is undergoing from tools of institutional power to tools of personal power.

Note on Capacity building

Unless an institution’s faculty learn how to improve their ability to teach in a way that promotes greater student engagement and more significant learning, all other institutional changes will have limited impact on the true bottom line in higher education: higher quality student learning (Dee Fink)