Encouraging Faculty Development

Yesterday at mLearn 2016 in Sydney, Lisa O’Neill, York University, talked on "Encouraging Faculty Development Through Micro-Credentialing". This presented a good overview of the mechanics of recognizing small units of learning with "badges". However, what is also needed is a way to motivate university academics to learn to teach and undertake activities which award such badges.

I suggest that university educators should follow the approach used by nurses and computer professionals in Australia to enhance their recognition of their profession. This could include draft policy for universities and government to require and recognize teaching qualifications of university academics. Also they could suggest changes to university ranking schemes to give teaching quality the same weighting as research output.

Australian universities commonly have a 40/40/20 expectation of academics: teaching 40%, research 40%, and engagement/administration 20%. So it would be reasonable to have teaching weighted equally with research, when ranking universities and university academics.