Engaging Faculty as Catalysts For Change: A Roadmap for Transforming Higher Education

The University of Minnesota's Faculty Fellowship Program fosters a multidisciplinary learning community that

• explores possibilities and good practices in technology-rich learning environments,
• produces scholarship in this area, and
• advances faculty leadership around these issues.

Introduced in 2000, the program grew out of the recognition that, in order for technological innovations in teaching and learning to be adopted and sustained, faculty culture needed to change. The Faculty Fellowship Program was created as a means to develop an active network of faculty practitioners who explore, test, and champion the thoughtful and innovative application of educational technologies. In its current manifestation, the program represents an 18-month commitment. Faculty apply by proposing a project they would like to work on, typically an ambitious course redesign. The program begins with an intensive 2.5-day workshop; thereafter, fellows meet in a seminar-like environment once a month to discuss topics of interest and share their work. They also meet individually with educational technology experts and researchers once a month to advance their own projects and scholarship. In addition to course redesign and research, a unique aspect of the Faculty Fellowship Program is the expectation that the fellows will collaborate on a project. Participants each receive an award of $10,000.

As the program has matured, so has our appreciation of the potential for faculty to enact positive and significant change on behalf of the institution. The collaborative project was introduced in 2008 to afford program participants the opportunity to develop and exercise leadership skills in the area of academic technology. The parameters of the collaborative project are broadly defined: The topic is teaching and learning with academic technology, and their first audience is the University of Minnesota community. The form, medium, and focus are left to the fellows.

While at the outset the program focuses on individual classroom innovation and redesign, gradually — and purposefully — the conversation shifts to improving instruction at the institution. Approximately 10 months into the 2010–11 program, we introduced this shift in perspective through a strategy mapping exercise (see figure 1) led by fellow John Bryson. As a group, we responded to the question "What should the university be doing in the next 2–5 years to improve education for our students?" We challenged ourselves to answer the questions "How would we do that?" and "If the university did these things, what would the consequences be?" This process of creating a broad, holistic vision set the stage for this project, which is both a manifesto and a roadmap for creating a university culture that supports excellence in teaching and learning with technology.

Figure 1. Strategy map

One of the primary programmatic goals of the Faculty Fellowship Program is to cultivate leadership qualities in our participants. Specifically, we aim to have participants model the influence of the program by

• discussing technology-enhanced learning with peers,
• serving as advisors or resources to their colleagues,
• participating in public conversations about educational technologies, and
• engaging administrators in conversations about university policies, procedures, and future directions of educational technology.

While we have empirical evidence (from program evaluation data) and anecdotal evidence (from a host of examples) of how we have fostered a broad community of educational technology leaders, the report summarized here is, in our estimation, the best evidence of our program's impact in both form and function.

Report Recommendations

Our full report begins with a grounded response to the question "What would it take to bring about a learning revolution at the University of Minnesota?" Inspired by our individual and collective experiences in the 2010–11 iteration of the Faculty Fellowship Program, we unequivocally state that "the answer lies in a coordinated, sustained, and holistic approach to faculty development in technology-rich teaching and learning." Citing extensive internal evidence that demonstrates

• the desire of faculty to learn more about thoughtfully employed technology in the classroom,
• students' perceptions of technology's effectiveness and utility, and
• empirical and anecdotal evidence of the transformational impact of educational technologies,

we establish that the demand and need for these resources is widespread. Where we fall short is in providing an environment that supports and sustains faculty exploration of new and better uses of technology in the classroom. Presently, the kind of faculty programs and experiences offered are limited in both scope and frequency. What is needed, we argue, is a diffused, "programmatic, evidence-based model of faculty development." We recognize that the resource-intensive Faculty Fellowship Program model outlined cannot scale to cover every instructor at an institution. There are, however, many actions that can be taken at various levels of the institution to improve the situation for everyone. The remainder of our report is dedicated to outlining the attributes of a university culture that support excellence in teaching and learning with technology.

In the report we delineate six features we deem necessary to faculty development programs designed to promote excellence in teaching and learning with technology. These include:

• Fostering good practice
• Offering an enduring and ongoing learning community
• Incorporating expert mentoring
• Responding to different levels of expertise
• Embracing the iterative and experimental nature of teaching practices
• Evaluating the impact of the program and assessing the interventions it supports

Good practices, as distinct from best practices, are grounded in scholarship that demonstrates which approaches to teaching improve student learning, given a variety of contextual and situational parameters. Ongoing learning communities consist of members who both contribute to and benefit from their collective knowledge and experiences to accomplish far more than could be done individually. Incorporating mentors with classroom experience and expertise in the scholarship of teaching and learning and educational technologies provides a solid resource base on which participants can draw for individual and collective endeavors.

Recognizing that one size does not, in fact, fit all, programs that are flexible and nimble enough to respond to the variation in skills, knowledge, and experience possessed by instructors serve participants well by meeting them where they are and providing what they need. Since many instructors receive little, if any, formal pedagogical training prior to joining the faculty, and given that teaching is not an inconsequential component of one's tenure and promotion dossier, the recognition of the iterative nature of experimentation in teaching and the rewarding of that experimentation is paramount. Systematically evaluating the impact of faculty development programs on participant attitudes, values, and behaviors and assessing the effectiveness of technological interventions in the classroom are necessary both to the justification of resources expended on the programs and to the contribution of knowledge regarding teaching and learning, respectively.

The report unpacks and operationalizes each of these six features into a series of concrete recommendations that can be implemented at the university, college or departmental, and individual instructor levels.

Conclusion

In addition to distributing the report widely at the University of Minnesota, we also presented it to two key constituencies: the Academic Technology Advisory Committee, which brings together key faculty, instructors, and staff across the system to provide insight and input on the university's academic technology directions and priorities, and the University Senate's Faculty Consultative Committee (FCC), which serves as the consulting body to the president and as executive committee of the Faculty Senate. Our meetings with these bodies significantly increased the visibility of both the report and the program that produced it. In late spring 2012, we received word that the budget for the program would be doubled, allowing for a near tripling of the number of participants (from six to 16) for the 2012–13 iteration of the Faculty Fellowship Program.

We are now confronting the challenges and issues related to scaling resource-intensive faculty development programs. To accommodate the greater workload that accompanies the expansion of any program, we have increased the number of consultants from two to four and the number of researchers from one to three, for a total of seven educational technology professionals. Our conversations previously took place in highly intimate and free-form seminars; we now are experimenting with additional formats designed to overcome the challenges posed by this larger group and more long-distance attendees. Regardless of the challenges, we welcome the opportunity to test our limits and put our ideas into practice.

One promising outcome of this project is the use of the recommendations in the report to assess where departments and units are with respect to faculty development and a culture that supports teaching and learning. We think that a system-wide discussion informed by the features we have outlined can help university leaders and administrators, together with educational technology experts, identify strengths and weaknesses to help departments and colleges create and meet long-term goals with regard to integrating technology into the curriculum.

We look forward to sharing the results of our efforts with this and other communities in the future. And, we welcome the opportunity to collaborate and consult with other colleges and universities as they begin to consider the approach we have outlined here.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the members of the 2010-12 Faculty Fellowship Program cohort whose good work we represent here: Aaron Boyson, Associate Professor, Communication, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota Duluth; John Bryson, McKnight Presidential Professor of Planning and Public Affairs, Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota Twin Cities; Christina E. Clarkson, Assistant Professor, Veterinary and Biomedical Sciences, College of Veterinary Medicine, University of Minnesota Twin Cities; Sehoya Cotner, Associate Professor of Teaching, Biology Program, College of Biological Sciences, University of Minnesota Twin Cities; Michelle Driessen, Director of General Chemistry, College of Science and Engineering, University of Minnesota Twin Cities; and Carol Flaten, Clinical Assistant Professor, Population Health & Systems, School of Nursing, University of Minnesota Twin Cities. We also wish to thank the following individuals for lending their talents and skills to the completion of this article: Kem Saichaie, Dave Lindeman, Kellie Greaves, and Shayla Dallmann.