Faculty and Contributed by Organizations or Campuses

Recently, on February 12, 2008, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) at Harvard University took a landmark step.  The faculty voted to adopt a policy requiring that faculty authors send an electronic copy of their scholarly articles to the university’s digital repository and that faculty authors automatically grant copyright permission to the university to archive and to distribute these articles unless a faculty member has waived the policy for a particular article. Essentially, the faculty voted to make open access to the results of their published journal articles the default policy for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University.

The Center for Studies in Higher Education, with generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is conducting research to understand the needs and desires of faculty for in-progress scholarly communication (i.e., forms of communication employed as research is being executed) as well as archival publication. In the interest of developing a deeper understanding of how and why scholars do what they do to advance their fields, as well as their careers, our approach focuses on fine-grained analyses of faculty values and behaviors throughout the scholarly communication lifecycle, including sharing, collaborating, publishing, and engaging with the public. Well into our second year, we have posted a draft interim report describing some of our early results and impressions based on the responses of more than 150 interviewees in the fields of astrophysics, archaeology, biology, economics, history, music, and political science.

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

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

This paper reports the results of over 1,100 responses to a late 2006 survey of UC faculty attitudes and behavior with regard to several key issues in scholarly publishing and scholarly communication. The report is timed to inform Universitywide discussions - many of them prompted by a series of faculty white papers - about strategic responses to challenges and opportunities in the evolution of scholarly publishing and communication. The survey also provides important insight into how the University's eScholarship publishing services (including those offered in partnership with the UC Press) can meet faculty needs.

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.

The University of Minnesota has expanded its orientation for new faculty members from several hours to 3 days. The faculty are given information on the library systems and invited to attend faculty development workshops in teaching and learning along with information on other various aspects and programs the university has to offer.

This Policy defines the ownership, distribution, and commercialization of rights associated with Intellectual Property developed at or received by the University of Michigan, and describes the general obligations associated with the technology licensing process.

Duke University's dean of arts and sciences commissioned the Faculty Database System (FDS) as an institutional content management system after learning of the tool's initial implementation in the mathematics department. The tool's ability to address several ongoing operational needs involving faculty curriculum vitae (CV) and related staff and graduate student data was matched by its ease of use and syndication capabilities.