In explaining the creation of the Faculty Innovators, that group of faculty trained in consultations and workshops who are sent to various colleges and departments around campus, we emphasized our primary motivation in their raison d’etre was that since faculty would not come to us for professional development, we would go to them. Remember, at our traditional workshops, presentations, and communities (professional learning, creative, and Breakfast and a Book), over a ten-year period, each year we were attracting only 10% of the faculty.
But, we realized, the establishment of the Faculty Innovators was by itself an insufficient solution to the lack of participation problem. Technology offered us another way to bring the development to our faculty. After all, even the busiest of faculty will spend ten minutes watching videos of dogs tobogganing down a ski slope or binge-watching Homeland. In fact, our local cable company with its “on-demand” capability helped provide a model for what we called “PD On Demand.”
Related Reading: How to Select Faculty Innovators
Using Technology to Improve Faculty Relations and Professional Development
Our foray into using technological programming actually began quite differently. For years the administration has been looking for a cost-effective way of training faculty pedagogically. After all, our university’s theme is “Excellence in Teaching Is Job 1.” Every year at New Faculty Orientation, we spent an entire day presenting a workshop on the best practices in teaching for our newbies. Unfortunately, we had groups slipping through the cracks who remained untrained in pedagogy—mid-season hires and part-time faculty. How could we catch those groups?
Several years ago for our Ed.D. program in Educational Leadership, we had helped the College of Education develop a course, EDL 830 College Teaching, which covered the best practices. One solution, then, for those falling through the pedagogical cracks was to enroll them in that course. Unfortunately, the College of Education did not have the personnel to teach that many sections, nor did the University want to defray the tuition cost of enrolling so many people.
Launching MENTOR: Modular Educational Network for Training with Online Resources
Our next solution was MENTOR, the Modular Educational Network for Training with Online Resources. Essentially, we reduced the 16-week, three-hour course to a one-hour interactive module that we placed on our university’s course-management system, Blackboard, and we enrolled all new full-time and part-time instructors at the University. Functioning similarly to those training videos on Title IX that the University requires of everyone, MENTOR even provided a test for the users to complete. Anyone scoring 80% received a downloadable certificate and became part of our permanent record of MENTOR graduates.
Related Reading: 7 Tips for Making the Most of Higher Ed Instructional Videos
Guidelines for Effective Faculty Instructional Videos
MENTOR was just the beginning because it painted pedagogy in broad strokes only. We needed to be able to fill in the gaps. Our unit received permission to hire a Media Producer, and we began to develop videos for what we called the Faculty Innovator Network (FIN). Before even scripting started, we developed some guidelines for effective instructional videos:
- Brevity: having read John Medina’s Brain Rules (Seattle: Pear Press, 2008), we were very conscious that short attention spans are found in professors as well as students. Therefore, we decided to keep all our videos short and as far under the fifteen-minute attention span as we could. This brevity was also shaped by professor’s schedules; even the busiest instructor can find ten minutes to view something beyond cute, cuddly kittens.
- Sharp Focus: over the past year, having reviewed conference proposals, submissions for two books in our “It Works for Me” series, and proposals for the Journal of Faculty Development, we have discovered how difficult it is for scholars to focus on their thesis. Our videos would simplify and synthesize the material and center on what Gerry Nosich in Learning to Think Things Through (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2009) calls “fundamental and powerful concepts.”
- Strong Visuals: In Brain Rules Medina also emphasizes that vision trumps the other senses: “If information is presented orally, people remember about ten percent, tested 72 hours after exposure. That figure goes up to 65% if you add a picture” (234). Therefore, we wanted authentic images that would core their way into instructors’ brains.
- Interest: anything we shot, we wanted to connect to major professorial interests.
Our first product for the Faculty Innovator Network looked like an MTV video. It ran less than four minutes, focused on the demographics of the typical EKU student, contained actual students, administrators, and alums during homecoming holding up signs during a parade, at a football game, and sitting in our ravine that emphasized such things as “50% of students work part-time.” Underlying the visuals was a catchy tune. Interestingly, we found faculty and students sometimes watched the video just to see who was in it. As former English instructors, we used to constantly talk about the importance of knowing your audience (something Communication also stresses), so we also used the video at New Faculty Orientation both to help our newbies get a sense of our student body and to introduce them to a new pedagogical tool, the Faculty Innovator Network.
Next time we’ll discuss some problems we have had, other videos shot and in progress, and where we hope to go with the FIN.
Author
Charlie Sweet is currently Co-Director of the Teaching & Learning Center (2007+) at Eastern Kentucky University. Before going over to the dark side of administration, for 37 years he taught American Lit and Creative Writing in EKU’s Department of English & Theatre, where he also served as chair (2003-2006). Collabo-writing with Hal Blythe, he has published well over 1000 items, including 15 books; of his 11 books with New Forums. Meet Charlie.
