Faculty Development Success Demonstrated in New Report From: University Currents Date: March 31, 2000 By: Greg Hand Phone: 513-556-1822 Archive: Campus News, General News How do college faculty, brought up in a tradition of chalkboard lectures, prepare for students raised on video games and the World-Wide Web? A new study, published in Higher Education (Elsevier Publishers, Amsterdam) describes how the University of Cincinnati develops new talents and resources for UC faculty. "The University as place, as a whole, as community must engage in learning to learn," said UC President Joseph A. Steger, who co-authored the paper with Lanthan D. Camblin Jr., UC associate professor of education. "Where do we find the faculty who can accept this challenge? I have said all along that we will find them on our campuses today. Our faculty know the challenge. They need only the resources to respond and to succeed in the new role that is demanded of them." At the University of Cincinnati, Camblin and Steger write, the university has taken a leadership role in the transformation of the faculty through a program called Faculty Development. Each year, the university provided $1.5 million to support faculty efforts to learn about technology, to explore new subjects, to catch up on the off-campus world, to develop partnerships, and to revise the courses they teach. The awards are beyond normal support for travel, equipment, and sabbaticals. The money is awarded competitively, and the results have been amazing, Camblin and Steger write. More than 800 of UC's 1,925 faculty applied for Faculty Development funding during the initial three-year period, and more than 400 were funded. "The faculty development model at the University of Cincinnati is changing the way the university functions," Camblin said. "This is not to argue that it is the only way, but it has produced outstanding results in a short number of years." During the period reviewed by Camblin and Steger, 410 faculty received individual awards of up to $5,000 while 25 teams of faculty received collaborative awards of up to $100,000. Faculty Development funds were also used to support a Summer Institute on instructional technology for about 30 faculty each year. Some examples of funded projects include: Twelve faculty from business and engineering were trained by the multinational Siemens Corporation in supply chain management. This training demonstrated the need for integrated ways of doing business, and is now being used as an innovative pedagogical tool in the classroom, and has given faculty ideas that can be used in research. The entire faculty in the College of Nursing participated in three days of workshops to learn about recent research on effective teaching and to develop their skills in using strategies that promote participation and active learning in the classroom. By the end of the academic year all faculty had significantly changed their approach to classroom teaching. Two faculty in English are acquiring the skills to collaborate on the creation of an interactive tutorial for writing in literature classes. This tutorial has the potential to contribute to enhanced learning in all classes with a writing component. Two interactive classrooms will allow faculty across the mathematics, science, and engineering disciplines to collaborate in order to enhance faculty technical skills in using interactive textbooks and programs such as Mathematica. These new skills will be utilized in the classroom and in research. Drawing on departmental expertise, mini-courses on the use of existing software and issues about effective use of interactive classrooms will be made available to faculty across the campus. Faculty in Marketing, History, and Political Science are working together to enhance their collective skills to develop prototype courses which provide students with a "virtual immersion" experience by utilizing international teams of students working on the same project through the Internet. These core faculty will train faculty in the use of a variety of distance learning technologies and motivate and challenge faculty in other disciplines to offer also virtual immersion courses. The Faculty Development Program began during negotiations between the AAUP and the UC administration. Faculty had realized a savings in health care costs. A suggestion was made to negotiators to think of using this savings for faculty development. AAUP representative Maita Levine immediately agreed and with President Steger continued the discussion with the intent to accomplish the establishment of such a fund and the mechanism for its granting. The Faculty Development Fund became a part of the University of Cincinnati-AAUP collective bargaining contract. "Currently, the University is in a second three-year contract from the original establishing of the Faculty Development Fund, and it appears that it has become an integral part of the university's academic initiatives to enhance faculty skills and effectiveness," Camblin said. The impact is best summed up by a comment made on the faculty survey by a professor in the College of Medicine while referring to a Summer Institute funded by the Faculty Development program, "The aggregate knowledge I have gained attending conferences, meetings, and mini-courses over my twenty-year tenure at the University of Cincinnati does not equal the positive effect that this two-week course had engendered in me."