Webinars Connect With Faculty

By David Hunt

By workshop standards, the turnout for last week's seminar on scholarly publishing was pretty impressive, pulling together 20 faculty members and graduate students interested in getting an insider's view of publishing their work in scholarly journals. It was the audience beyond the walls of the meeting room in the D.H. Hill Library that made the event noteworthy.

Scattered across campus and around the world were 30 other participants who logged on to the event live over the Internet, complete with video, sound and graphics. In India, a graduate student in wood and paper science said he was excited to be joining the conversation.

"I think my faculty advisor will be happy to note this as well," he added.

Deanna Dannels and Chris Anson of the Campus Writing and Speaking Program provided tips for writing for a scholarly publication in a webinar for faculty last week.

He wasn't the only one cheering the launch of the new technology. For the staff in the Office of Faculty Development, Monday's webinar was the culmination of weeks of planning and a satisfying taste of things to come.

"In the past, these workshops would attract a few people in person," says assistant director Nancy Fire. "This time, we had a very popular subject, and we drew a large audience, including a lot of post-docs and teaching assistants."

That audience will grow in the coming months. The webinar has been archived and is available for download here.

"It doesn't make sense for someone to spend a whole lot of energy developing a workshop and after the event, it's gone," Fire says. "Now people can download these as webinars and listen to them at their desk or at home on their computer. They can play them more than once and share them with colleagues."

But that's not the whole story, Fire adds. The Office of Faculty Development, which replaced the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning last summer, has fundamentally changed the way the university provides faculty resources.

"Previously, we focused on teaching faculty to teach," she explains. "Now, we're moving to providing resources for faculty to assist them in all the parts of their work at NC State, not just teaching."

A review of upcoming seminars illustrates her point. Over the next three months topics include copyright protection and online teaching, how to integrate work and personal responsibilities, finding funding for research, dealing with plagiarism before it happens, classroom assessment techniques, and dealing with sensitive issues in online discussions.

"I call it a paradigm shift," Fire says.

There have also been new opportunities for collaboration across campus, enabling the office to make use of resources, including faculty experts, in other faculty development programs. Last week's workshop, for example, was made possible through collaboration with Chris Anson and Deanna Dannels of the Campus Writing and Speaking Program.

This collaborative spirit is also evident in the way the video and Internet technology has been integrated into the program. Fire worked with staff in DELTA, the university's Distance Education & Learning Technology Applications department to plan, record, disseminate by Internet, and archive the program's offerings. 

"They can come anywhere on campus with this box full of equipment," she says. "By attaching it to an Ethernet cable, they can capture video, audio and slides and send a live feed to anybody who has signed up for it."

Dr. Betsy Brown says new technologies make it possible to provide faculty development programs more efficiently and effectively.

Dr. Betsy Brown, vice provost for faculty affairs, is the senior administrator responsible for the new initiative. She says the new Office of Faculty Development was established in response to recommendations made by the Working Group on Faculty Development.

"We have something called the six realms of faculty responsibility, and there is a very clear definition of the range of expectations that the university has for faculty in those areas," she says. "We recognized that if we are going to have expectations in a variety of areas, then the institution needs to find resources to help faculty members achieve the expectations."

At the same time, budget constraints required that the resources be offered in the most effective and efficient manner possible. Archiving the workshops as podcasts fulfills that requirement and benefits busy faculty members as well.

"Research about how people learn makes it clear that one-shot discussions aren't going to have much of a long-term effect on people," Brown says. "So by using new communication technologies, we're trying to build in, where we can, a kind of continuing conversation."

While she's pleased that the program's first webinar drew a large audience, that's not how she measures success.

"We don't measure the proof of our effectiveness by the number of people who attend or watch an event," she says. "This is our goal: When faculty members need information, they know where to find it and it helps them do their jobs better."

Links:

• Office of Faculty Development

• Archived Webinars

• Webinar on Scholarly Publishing