Within the past several years, faculty development has been identified as a critical need at UB. A 2017 Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE) faculty survey yielded overwhelming feedback that support in teaching and learning was needed on campus. In response to this call, and an environmental scan of UB’s peer institutions that CEI conducted, CEI not only flipped the mission of the Center from educational research to teaching and learning, but also developed the Academies to address the explicit needs of the faculty.

The CEI Academies for faculty development are comprised of three tracks: Designing Experiences, Learning Paradigms, and Teaching Effectively. Each Academy consists of four individual two-hour workshops with an additional optional hour for participants to troubleshoot, ask questions, followup, and review feedback from the learning designers. Through the Academies, participants receive valuable instruction, interact with colleagues, share challenges and successes, and apply concepts to the courses they are instructing.

The main objective of the CEI Academies is to meet the faculty development needs of the university by offering these tracks, which are rooted in the latest learning science and theory. Through a continuous improvement model, CEI revises and enhances the academies based on participant feedback, surveys, and expert reviews. It should also be noted that the Academies are aligned with the university’s guidelines for tenure and promotion, to help faculty who may be working toward these objectives.

The Academies operate under a shareable and scalable model, which allows the Center to administer this impactful program with a total center staff of less than 15 people. While the standard face-to-face iteration of the Academies are open to all faculty at the university, CEI is currently in the concluding stages of developing a corresponding online version of the Academies to make participation for the university’s faculty more convenient. Additionally, CEI is close to launching a MOOC version of the Academies through Coursera, which will afford the Center with the ability to share this innovative program with our peers, not only SUNY system-wide, but nationally more broadly. We also plan to share the Academies with SUNY learning designers at a workshop hosted by the Center this summer.

In flipping the faculty development model from individual to group instruction, the Center has been able to leverage regular fiscal resources to a greater degree of effectiveness. Specifically, whereas one staff member used to spend 2-3 hours assisting an individual faculty member, we are now able to serve 10-20 faculty members under that same amount of instruction time. Additionally, a modest SUNY Performance Improvement Fund grant has been utilized to help support staff salaries, the Academies MOOC development, and the building of the Faculty Collaboration studio (which serves as the home base for the in-person version of the Academies). CEI also received an Innovative Instruction Technology Grant, which is funding a longitudinal research study on the Academies’ effectiveness.

Accessible content is a priority throughout the academies and serves as the basis of our Teaching Effective Academy. Utilizing Ally, accessibility checkers in Word, PowerPoint as well as the Universal Design for Learning Framework, participants are walked through best practices, an introduction to federal/state/university guidelines and a step-by-step tutorial on working with updating documents to meet accessibility requirements. Participants are encouraged to collaborate and discuss their experiences serving the students on campus as well as brainstorming how to create inclusive and accessible learning environments.

The Academies, to date, have operated under a hybrid in-person/online format with Blackboard serving as the digital learning environment. This affords CEI the flexibility to meet with faculty in person, while then using the various features of Blackboard to followup and communicate with faculty regarding course registration, information, assignments, assignment submissions, feedback, and course content.

Specifically related to online learning, as a decentralized research university, our individual schools chart and develop their own paths toward creating their own online infrastructures as relevant and appropriate to their respective programs. As the schools invest in online infrastructure and capacity, CEI is on hand to support the schools in bringing faculty up to speed, not only generally though our regular opt-in Academies offerings, but also in critical tailor-made partnerships with the academic units. As an example, the College of Arts and Sciences sent a cohort through an intensive week-long custom designed Academies boot camp, which was intended to prepare key faculty in that unit as they chart their future paths to online course development.

Key to the success of the Academies is that the UBlearns (Blackboard) administration team also resides within CEI’s office. Administering the Academies via this learning environment has required significant partnership between their team and the Academies team. Through this partnership, the Academies instructors are able to administer the various lessons to a high degree of quality, while also being able to provide Academies participants with expert knowledge about how to use UBlearns. Simply stated, the Academies are key to a strong and well supported online growth trajectory.

The CEI Academies are truly university-wide in scope, and have seen well over 100 participants since being offered. Currently, the Academies have had participation from all of the academic units across campus, and as mentioned above, CEI is partnering with individual units to support their respective programmatic needs as such critical faculty development needs arise.

In addition, CEI has offered the Academies to relevant staff, who require developmental support in teaching and learning. With the Academies continuously gaining traction, we expect that a significant percentage of the university’s faculty will have taken at least one of the faculty development tracks within the next two years. This vision is further supported by the Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs driving a New Faculty Academy iteration of the CEI Academies, where the university offers and promotes these resources to incoming new faculty at UB.

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