Faculty CPD: The View from the Bleachers.

This particular post has been in my drafts folder for a while now.  The post started off as some ponderings, based on tweets from fellow instructional designers (over the summer), that lamented the fact that faculty members really didn't attend professional development opportunities that they had worked so hard to put together. With the start of the new academic year just ahead of us (at least for my campus) it seemed like a good opportunity to return to this post.  This is my local view, framed chiefly from my experiences where I work, but also from chatting about this with local colleagues at other institutions nearby over the last 15 years.  Yes...the problem ain't new!

One thing I've seen over the years is the reliance on bad metrics and other various bad indicators like foot traffic through the ID offices, the number of workshops offered, and butts in seats at the workshops. This isn't new.  Even as far back as when I was a training manager for our academic library, what the administration wanted was butts in seats, in-person, during the hours of our employment (9-5). The same was true when I was an educational technologist.  Here's the thing: it's not 1999. People who want to learn how to do something can't necessarily come when you're scheduled to work. You can either adapt your hours of operation and/or offer more virtual offerings. In a post-emergency pandemic world, the same constraints exist as before, but people are even more reluctant to go to campus to sit in a room to learn whatever. So, what sorts of metrics make sense for the services that we're offering? And, who is deciding these metrics?  Is it managers who are disconnected from the process? (as was the case with me all those years ago?)  Or is it people who are on the front lines of training?

Second, it's summertime, or at least it was when the flurry of those tweets occurred. Summertime is like Schrödinger's Training Period: It's both the best time to offer workshops and the worst time to offer workshops. When you do offer workshops, you will find out that it's actually not a good time to offer workshops and other sorts of CPD.  Why is that you might ask? Well, faculty are 9-month employees. They are compensated from September to May. In the summer months, they are not paid (or they are paid from a grant fund for specific grant tasks).  Expecting them to partake in our wonderful workshops is not fair.  It's even more unfair if you have to go to the campus where you're charged for parking. Unless your faculty are 12-month employees, or you're compensating faculty for their time, summer CPD shouldn't be a thing. This kind of stuff should be in the "analysis phase" of the workshop design process 😉.

Next, I'll mention something that fellow instructional designers, especially new ones, might find controversial: CPD for teaching isn't something that faculty care about, at least not enough to add it to their calendar and make a plan for it.  The requirement to be a college/university professor is a terminal degree like a doctorate (or in the case where a terminal doctorate is not an option, a terminal master's, like an MFA). What your terminal degrees prepare you for is either research (as is the case with the doctorate), or some sort of practice (e.g., various kinds of art as is the case with the MFA).  Teaching isn't what you're prepared for.  In fact, it's most likely the case that you're basically just mimicking what you've seen done in classes in your previous educational experiences.  Teaching should be valued, but it's usually something that doctors aren't prepared for, and are not rewarded for once they start teaching.  If you look at a tenure-track faculty member's annual evaluation a big component of the evaluation is weighted toward research and service. Yes, teaching is there, but it's there as a token item IMO.  For non-tenure instructors, they are compensated only for teaching, nothing more and nothing less, which means that they aren't compensated for the hours they spend on professional development.

When there is some value attached to teaching CPD by faculty, I would say that instructional designers and their expertise is really undervalued (or not valued at all). At least at my institution there seemed to be a bit of tension between what instructional designers offer and what grassroots faculty-led initiatives (like centers for the improvement of teaching) organize. Even in my own context, another entity, the office for faculty development is led by a tenure-track faculty member, showcases resources by faculty, and instructional designers and librarians are basically not included. This on top of most resources for faculty development seem to be tenure related. In any case, I would argue that institutions are complicit in the undervaluing and sidelining of instructional designers (and librarians)🤷‍♂️. When your own institution doesn't support you in this endeavor, are you just part of an elaborate façade?

Finally, I would say that there is another element that's really inhibiting the participation of faculty in CPD, and leading to a bit of burnout amongst instructional designers.  That factor is the lack of collaboration amongst campuses. I'll focus specifically on Massachusetts State Colleges and Universities. In our state, we have 15 community colleges and 14 colleges and universities (if I lump the UMasses together with other state schools). While there have been instances of sharing materials with one another (at least between personal contacts in the UMass schools), that only includes the training materials.  Why not foster cross-institutional collaboration between state schools?  A more comprehensive training calendar can be developed and offered. I also think that cross-institutional faculty acquaintances can be valuable beyond training.  By working together, instructional designers at every campus don't have to provide all the trainings.  Rather, training can be shouldered by many institutions, in cross-functional teams, and after training is done, instructional designers on individual campuses can act more like coaches. I don't understand why this is rocket science. 🙄

Finally, I think the elephant in the room that no one is acknowledging is the fatigue from the past 5 years In our case it's three years of COVID that came after a few years of austerity.  Austerity looks differently depending on where you look on campus, but often it means that lines that were previously tenure-track are now not replaced and everyone needs to do more with less. That kind of stuff does tend to wear one out, and when you're tired you aren't in a prime spot for CPD.

I say that this is not rocket science, but it really depends on where you're viewing the field. Having worked in IT, and in ID, and for the Library, and now in an academic department (and as an adjunct for the last 10 years...), these different frames serve to show a more holistic picture of what's going on.  I think instructional designers usually only have one view, and it's hard to break away from the butts-in-seats "let's offer more training and hope they come" model. You need cross-department and cross-functional teams to do better, but those aren't always available.

Just my 2c.  Your thoughts?