Faculty and Teaching

What do faculty really want from faculty development efforts designed to help them teach with technology? How can institutions best meet faculty needs in this area? This presentation will share results from longitudinal studies of faculty, students, and technology at the University of Minnesota and will discuss the impact of these results on our faculty development efforts.

Anthropologists say professors should stop looking at measuring outcomes as an external threat and start taking ownership of the process.

A dynamic information base aids research into existing technology practices among faculty and fosters partnerships.

Burnout has been identified as a significant issue among those in instructional positions. The purpose of the present research was to identify and describe the status of burnout among higher education online instructors. The population for this study included responses of 76 online instructors employed by baccalaureate granting institutions within the United States. A demographic survey and the Maslach Burnout Inventory-Educators Survey (MBI-ES) were used to collect data from respondents. Data analysis
revealed online instructors possessed an average score on the emotional exhaustion subscale, high degree of depersonalization, and low degree of personal accomplishment

Harvard University has begun experimenting with virtual office hours this semester. TAs will begin holding real-time, online help sessions for students this week. Using free, Java-based software, students can log on, chat with each other (via text or microphone) and even “raise their hands” with the click of a button, which adds them to a queue on the teaching fellow’s computer.

This paper describes a four-step needs assessment process that institutions can use to determine the gaps between current and desired states of technology infrastructure, facilitating rapid decision making. The framework described focuses on aligning learning outcomes and technology tools and can help institutions compare the current state of technology infrastructure with a desired state to best meet identified learning outcomes.

Will faculty reduce lectures, become facilitators of learning, and adopt interactive learning methods? Are development tools available to help bring about these changes? Will students benefit? These questions will be addressed in Florida Community College's presentation of the SIRIUS Project involving over 300 faculty.

Faculty and students are recognizing blogging's learning potential, including the chance to practice writing, reflect on others' thinking, and respond to critical analyses of one's own work. In this paper, a graduate student explores the campus "blogosphere" to discover who is blogging and what they are posting, as well as how faculty are using blogs in their courses and the results they are seeing.