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Goal: Invest in Faculty and Staff Leadership

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on November 5, 2007 at 11:29:29 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 2007 Educause Horizon 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 wth how scholarship is actually conducted until constraints imposed by traditional tenure and promotion processes are eased.

 

We need to provide an environment where

 

  • Faculty and Staff have the support they need to lead on these issues, and
  • Faculty and Staff are rewarded for that leadership.

 

 

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 intelligent risk-taking.

 

Part of this is encouraging faculty to use free Web 2.0 solutions available and training them in them, so that they can roll their own solutions rather than be limited to what can provided centrally. Where free solutions do not exist but low-cost third-party hosted solutions do, a small fund might be set up to provide micro-grants so that faculty might purchase those services if their project or application advances the goals stated in this document.

 

Aligning rewards with participation in these new arenas is a more difficult matter, and beyond the scope of this document (and beyond the scope of the Academic Technology group in general). As we go forward, however, this element will be crucial: we leave it up to Academic Affairs, the Senate, and other parties to address this issue, but note here that such realignment is critical to the success of our endeavor.

 

Desirable Outcomes:

 

  • Faculty and Staff leading technological innovation, in a way decentralized, but consistent with the goals of the institution
  • A system of rewards that correctly reflects the commitment of the College to innovation in Academic Technology

 

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)

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