One of the worst shortcomings, of many holders of high degrees in various specializations, is the false sense of reaching the top of knowledge which results in inflated ego that does not need further development. This problem has to be tackled first & those persons have to be convinced that the journey of acquiring knowledge extends from "womb to tomb".

A wise administration needs to know the ones among the staff who have "actual" competency to carry out the development programs. It is costly to rely upon "importing" experienced skill persons to do the job. In the "selection" of "available" staff , due care has to be present and this entails eliminating "personal" factors & biases. The staff chosen must not be "the boss's boys".

Faculty development programs ought to stand on two legs: improvement in research & enhancement of teaching skills. The second leg is usually overlooked at many universities & this is one of the reasons behind the "observed" decline in the quality of graduates.

One of the worst shortcomings, of many holders of high degrees in various specializations, is the false sense of reaching the top of knowledge which results in inflated ego that does not need further development. This problem has to be tackled first & those persons have to be convinced that the journey of acquiring knowledge extends from "womb to tomb".

A wise administration needs to know the ones among the staff who have "actual" competency to carry out the development programs. It is costly to rely upon "importing" experienced skill persons to do the job. In the "selection" of "available" staff , due care has to be present and this entails eliminating "personal" factors & biases. The staff chosen must not be "the boss's boys".

Faculty development programs ought to stand on two legs: improvement in research & enhancement of teaching skills. The second leg is usually overlooked at many universities & this is one of the reasons behind the "observed" decline in the quality of graduates.

We do have a Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) that is responsible for professional development of faculty. The Center hosts several workshops in different areas such as pedagogy and technology each semester in which faculty are free to participate in order to keep their skills sharp.

Best regards,

Debra

Peer coaching, mentoring and training is an area which we have found useful and less costly.

Dr. Nizar, Dr. Debra & Dr.Wondwosen...thank you so much for sharing your thoughts. Dr. Debra, CETL at your place is run by a group of faculty specially qualified in medical education or faculty members from other departments who has additional qualification in medical education voluntarily contributes?

@Babu: Our centre was run by educationalists, not experts in any discipline such as medicine or engineering. This approach has shortcomings (which we can work around and accept). We just have to learn the language of the educationalist. In the other direction, for example, the educationalists have to learn E-learning etc from the technical specialists.

To bootstrap the process In a resource limited university, a single, innovative educationalist would have to brush up on modern methods of education. The person would make an (adult education) Blackboard course out of the little research and present this (on-line!) as an exemplar to copy.

Twenty-five different types of faculty professional development programs were included in this study. These program types included: (1) institutionally-supported self-teaching opportunities, (2) peer mentoring, (3) collaborative course design, (4) workshops, (5) online training, and (6) quality assurance evaluation programs. These faculty development program types were selected based on a review of the literature citing common faculty development programs for online instruction

Academic exchanges between countries could be another option. Erasmus+ offers grants for staff mobilities between Europe and some countries of the world. Also you could take advantage of grants if they are offered by the country government.

The most important aspect is that faculty development must be driven by the faculty itself. The professors are interested by themselves to develop their faculty further. If this point is reached, support from outside can be helpful.

At the Center for Language Education and Research at Sophia University, Tokyo, we launched a new EAP/CLIL program for undergraduate students in 2014. Together with this change, we created a regular INSET program and we have ten 1.5 hour session per term. 'Sharing' is our principle, and we create a forum around our challenges and goals and discuss our approaches to teaching EAP and CLIL courses. It is a helpful way in which to enhance a CLIL community of practice where we can share our methodology in a social constructivist way.

Outsourcing is time consuming and thus costly.

The administration, having recruited the people they trust, should put that trust into action. They can structure a survey in which they include the elements of concern. Based on the data, they can schedule one or more meetings (by department then by faculty) to discuss the most important elements with everyone.

This way, they will have built a shared vision about how change happens with everyone's consent, how to make it more cost-effective, how to reward contributors, and how to build stronger ties between colleagues.

Outsourcing is time consuming and thus costly. Using all known factors, it is easy to organize work shop optimizing.

Following

You can your self-paced training or intelligent tutoring systems. You can also use some of you colleagues who are resourceful to serve as resource persons.