More about Professional Development

We just had an Assurance of Learning (C) (just kidding, that's not copyrighted) day at my institution. It's a day when the university cancels all classes and instructs every academic department to congregate and then pay attention to the learning taking place in their classes. In the past we've looked at assessments of learning on a department level, and the data that come from them. This time I got the first hour of the day to talk about several trends in higher ed and explain my new role as Teaching Enhancement Coordinator (TEC). The trends I talked about were the reduction in government support/increased reliance on tuition (not sustainable), increased competition for students from schools and private business offering new and different models, and the increasing saturation of technology in society, including higher ed. In my mind the response to all of these substantial pressures is to redouble our focus on the quality of instruction. Governments will continue to fund us, and students will want to come to us, if we have the best instruction in the state/region. We can set ourselves apart from our competitors if we can demonstrate that our instruction is better than theirs. And infusing our instruction with technology like it is infused in the rest of our lives will make us relevant to the digital- and mobile-natives that will show up in our classes from now on (they're already there). 

To me this means that my institution needs to put some resources behind the effort to improve instruction. Faculty needs accessible pedagogical resources, like webinars, workshops, professional learning communities, and more. And they also need to see that promotion and raises are tied to pedagogical improvement; professional development needs to be baked into our promotion and tenure policies and annual review policies. Plus, faculty need to see that this is not just another added thing to do on top of their existing duties. You're less likely to hear complaints about the government than to hear faculty complaints about being too busy. Perhaps the answer here is release time (which is highly sought-after), or a class schedule that leaves more regular time for these activities. Something.

It's an interesting time in higher ed, with big changes around the corner. How we deal with these changes will determine if the university exists 15-20 years from now. Universities have been around for centuries, but there's not law of nature that says they have to exist. Technology, population increase, income inequality: these are forces that have swept away or altered large sectors of society. I hope we can adapt to these changes, not go extinct.