Dee Fink of Creating Significant Learning Experiences (2003) fame has championed centers for teaching and learning (CTLs) in his books, articles, and appearances at national conventions and campuses across the country. One of his key ideas is that CTLs should be funded at the rate of 1-1.5% of the total salaries of that university’s faculty, and if the CTL is charged with developing teaching assistants, part-time faculty, and other groups (e.g., first-year course instructors), their salaries should be included in the calculation. We can hear the laughter in response to Dee’s dictum from here, and we echo your scoffing.
CTLs are traditionally one of the most under-funded units on any campus. If our budget were one-tenth of Dee’s suggestion, our implementation could fulfill our imagination. The hard, cold reality is that CTLs must do more with less, for despite the pressure on colleges and universities from their accrediting agencies to demonstrate true faculty development, most of us inside the CTLs spend our lives eking out a meager existence, begging deans and provosts for money, and having to perform all the jobs we can’t pay someone else to do.
So when we (Charlie, Hal, and I) began the Faculty Innovators (FIs) program, our big worry wasn’t that we were starting before we had the whole thing figured out, but rather that while we believed we had a brilliant concept for reaching those 90% of the faculty who would not come by our CTL (but nevertheless need faculty development), we were still missing one thing—funding. How much money did we figure a program consisting of people—Faculty Innovators—and programming—the Faculty Innovation Network—would cost?
Related Reading: Is Your Center of Teaching and Learning Be A Hammer or Nail?
Personnel Costs
We began with the obvious. While we were going to have to do a lot of additional work administering the program, we were not going to see one more penny in our bi-weekly paycheck, but we were going to have to hire additional personnel. Our figures were based on our working for a 16,000-student regional comprehensive with three doctoral programs and five colleges. In terms of personnel, here’s what we projected:
- Media Specialist
- Instructional Designer
- Faculty Innovator Coordinator (i.e., one release per year)
- (9) Faculty Innovators (i.e., one release/year/person).
We have deliberately left out the actual costs as the amounts will vary a great deal depending upon the size of the school, the location, and union contracts. At our institution, we would figure that the cost of paying someone else to teach a three-hour course at approximately $2600, so all ten would cost the University $26,000. In our case we hired a full-time media specialist (to produce videos for our PD On Demand system), but we settled this first year for one-quarter of an instructional designer’s time for one semester. Moreover, other personnel costs aren’t figured in as we use a graduate assistant and two administrative assistants (AA) for a small portion of time both for our primary and our FI workload. Just this morning, for instance, we had an AA place a notice on the campus email system about a PLC to be held next semester. A guesstimate of our total personnel expenses would be around $70,000.
Related Reading: The Faculty Developer’s Most Important Question
Non-Personnel Costs
So much of what we use for the Faculty Innovators is part of the campus environment. For instance, the group met this morning in the Faculty Lounge, which is free. We utilized our unit’s projector that threw a Google Docs document upon the TLC’s white screen. We didn’t have to pay for heat or electricity, and the three of us supplied two pots of free coffee.
We have yet to subscribe to a journal, but even there we have an in. I am the incoming editor of the Journal of Faculty Development. While we have a digital repository for key FI documents and the Faculty Innovator Network, occasionally we make copies of reprinted articles or someone’s workshop to distribute to the FI notebooks (which we got free because they were left over from New Faculty Orientation).
Our big non-human expense has been for books for our Professional Learning Communities (PLCs). We run three PLCs/semester, and we encourage each PLC facilitator to choose at least one book. Last semester, for example, our How learning Works facilitator chose two, costing over $30 per paperback X 2 X n15 PLC members. Right there we spent around $3000. And occasionally we serve food as in our each-semester retreats. Sometimes we pay for travel to local, regional, or national conferences.
As you can see, the annual cost for the program might be $100,000. On the other hand, a program that reaches every faculty member . . . priceless.
Author
Dr. Russell Carpenter is director of the Noel Studio for Academic Creativity and Program Director of the Minor in Applied Creative Thinking at Eastern Kentucky University. He is also Assistant Professor of English. Dr. Carpenter has published on the topic of creative thinking, among other areas, including two texts by New Forums Press. In addition, he has taught courses in creative thinking in EKU’s Minor in Applied Creative Thinking, which was featured in the New York Times in February 2014. Meet Russell.
