FACULTY/PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM

Improving Courses, Professional Development, etc.

Because institutional services for course improvement and faculty professional development must be able to support all interested faculty, such institutional services must be extremely cost-effective. Because faculty face an almost bewildering number of options for improvement, institutional services and policies must be flexible and effective.

This page includes free resources as well as links to descriptions of how The TLT Group helps colleges and universities like yours help faculty members to continually improve their courses and teaching. The left hand column contains resources about the content of course improvement (ideas and materials for improving teaching), while the right hand column describes ideas for changing the methods of course improvement and faculty support.

Goals for Course Improvement: TLT Group Materials (for more relevant resources, see also "Visions and Strategies")

• The "Seven Principles of Good Practice: Technology as Lever." A growing library of teaching ideas, assessment tools, workshop materials, and more.  One way to think about the effectiveness of instruction is through Chickering and Gamson's seven principles of good practice, principles the TLT Group has used in both faculty development and evaluation/assessment.  This page links to explanations of the principles, hundreds of ideas for using technology to implement them, workshop materials, assessment tools, and more.

• Low Threshold Applications: Something is 'low threshold' if it's easy, inexpensive and low-risk to learn about, use and assess.  Many of the ideas described in the '7 principles' collection above are low threshold. Click here for the "LTA of the Week."

• Best Practices in Information Literacy Programs for Undergraduates. Faculty and librarians need to work together to gradually development student research skills. These resources and workshops have been developed with ACRL.

• Collections & Repositories of Instructional Resources. Includes links to a wide range of collections of free resources such as MERLOT.  We're working with MERLOT; if your institution wants to work with both TLTG and MERLOT, let us know; we're developing a discount program.

• IT and General Education.  What are the implications of technology use in the world and in the academy for the shape of a college education. These pages include ideas, examples, and online workshops that may be of special interest to curriculum committees and councils.

• Scholarship of Teaching - Assessment Resources for Faculty.  Note: for institutional strategies for expanding the scholarship of teaching, click here.

• Course Management Systems.  This Resource Page contains a wealth of resources about getting more value out of systems from Angel, Blackboard, CHEF, and Desire2Learn to WebCT.

• Learning Spaces, physical and online - how to evaluate current spaces and design new ones that will be fully, effectively used.

• Distance Education.  This Resource Page includes a variety of resources of use to leaders and faculty in programs of distance and distributed learning. It's of some benefit for improving blended and hybrid courses, too.

• Personalizing Pedagogy   There are many kinds of good teaching and good teachers -- just as there are many kinds of learners and learning.  Information technology offers new options for identifying, supporting, and matching them more effectively.

Inclusive, Cost-Effective Strategies for Course Improvement and Faculty/Professional Development

• Low-Threshold Applications/Activities (LTA's): a fresh approach to help faculty members directly and to help with faculty development, professional development, and course improvement.

• Student Technology Assistant Programs. Proven approaches for using well-trained undergrads to provide a variety of kinds of support for teaching and learning with technology, including skilled support for faculty.

• Using evaluation to improve your faculty development/support services. Click here for public version of this page (2003). Click here for the larger, up-to-date version (subscriber-only) of this page --- to find out if your institution is a subscriber and to get the institutional username and password, click here.

• Ways to use video in faculty and professional development. This 1995 paper describes two contrasting ways of using preproduced video, both valuable: for helping people visualize an innovative approach that they may then decide to adopt, and as part of a strategy to prepare them for the problems that may occur when they actually use the new approach to alter their teaching. Click here for paper. 

• TLT Group Professional and Faculty Development Service. Using the kinds of resources linked above, The TLT Group can work with your staff and a cohort of faculty from your institution, system, or association.  Using hybrid events and web resources, we work with them over a period of months or years, as they gradually improve their courses, use assessment data to guide those improvements, and help their colleagues move in similar directions.

  Here's one example of recent TLT Group consulting in this arena, for Auburn University in Alabama.