Spring Focus Session
Faculty Engagement and Development: Effective and Innovative Practice
More than any other core mission in higher education, teaching and learning is the locus of change, innovation, and strategic re-imagining at the institutional level. As new teaching and learning options proliferate almost daily, faculty engagement and development is of fundamental importance to institutional success. Faculty development improves practice and manages change by enhancing individual strengths and abilities, as well as organizational capacities and culture. How is the teaching and learning community rethinking its approach to this task? What innovations are we seeing in faculty engagement and development, given higher education’s re-examination of its teaching and learning mission?
On April 1, 2, and 3, ELI hosted its Spring Focus Session 2014, "Faculty Engagement and Development: Effective and Innovative Practice" inside an Adobe Connect learning environment where participants exchanged ideas and collaborated interactively with the teaching and learning community.
The discussion included themes such as:
- Management of faculty development programs
- Demonstrating the connection and alignment of faculty development programs with core institutional needs (i.e., improved instruction; innovative instructional approaches; instructional expertise in new instructional models; effective use of instructional technologies; student engagement/retention)
- Faculty development in emergent areas: learning analytics, new instructional models, competency-based education, adaptive learning
- Faculty development programs for incoming faculty members and adjunct faculty members
- New models of faculty development programs