Quality Enhancement Project Institutional Reports: Phase 1 Due Date: 11 December 2015
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- Bu səhifədəki naviqasiya:
- Type of workshop Number of sessions Staff attended Students attended
- Faculty/Centre Conference Proceedings Accredited/listed Journal articles/book chapters
- Total 61 22
- 2.4 Provide one or more (but not more than 5) exemplars of changes that have not been successful and suggest reasons
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In addition to research capacity development initiatives that are faculty-implemented, the Postgraduate Centre, which serves all nine faculties, organises opportunities for UJ staff that are designed to support their development as researchers and supervisors. These opportunities also enhance the staff as teachers, as they contribute to their ability to facilitate the learning of postgraduate students and to supervise their research. Currently, research capacity development for lecturers offered from the Postgraduate Centre has three main foci: training on quantitative and qualitative research approaches and programmes, writing for publication, and supervisor development. The supervisor development initiative is elaborated on later in this document. Workload allocation that is equitable is deemed important in the achievement of the UJ’s strategic goals. Broad principles relating to workload have been approved by Senate and these serve as a guideline to faculties. It is up to the faculties and in some instances departments to implement the guidelines and to develop a workload plan that meets their specific needs. It is important not to overload junior academics so as to allow for a reflective approach to teaching, and to the development of innovative and effective teaching strategies and practices. An example of how one faculty addresses the issue of workload is provided in a later section (see 2.3). 2.3 Provide one or more (but not more than 5) exemplars to illustrate specific aspects of the changes that are successful. Provide evidence for claims of success. Where an activity is in the planning stages, indicate what evidence will be collected. Ongoing discipline and/or faculty specific professional development Various UJ initiatives have had great impact in terms of facilitating deep engagement on teaching and learning, and in some instances transforming practice. At the departmental level, the series of teaching and learning workshops in the Department of Medical Imaging and Radiation Sciences in the Faculty of Health Science facilitated by staff in Professional Academic Staff Development (PASD) is a good example of the effectiveness of developing pedagogical competence at the level of the discipline. The main areas of engagement were on teaching and learning, assessment and constructive feedback; developing a teaching philosophy and portfolio and module development. Staff indicated that they found the workshop very useful. This is evident in the workshop evaluation forms as well as in follow-up requests for engaging in practitioner research arising from some of the workshops. In addition, two members of staff have decided to embark on PhD studies as part of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). Similar deep engagements have occurred in other departments, for example in Anthropology and Development Studies and Politics. Faculty specific workshops relating to portfolio development and assessment have also been offered in the Faculty of Engineering and Built Environment. These have been well attended and the feedback has been positive. In addition, follow-up requests for additional engagement on dialogic teaching and learning engagement have been requested. Evidence of change in practice is also documented in teaching portfolios that have been submitted from promotion and in assessment tasks that have been subsequently developed. Professional development at the faculty level is best illustrated by the work done in the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture. Scholarly Teaching in Art and Design (STAND) is a forum that offers regular seminar opportunities for the sharing of educational research, teaching practice and theory. It is also a community of practice that aims to build and maintain critical teaching practices through sharing of critical scholarship related to learning and teaching in Art, Design and Architecture. STAND values praxis, generation of new knowledge, theorization, collegiality, democracy and social justice, critiques, creativity and transformation. There will be a showcase of the work that has been done in the area of socially responsive pedagogical practice in the Arts in October 2015. In addition to the First Year Academy which addresses the specificities and challenges relating to teaching and learning at the first year level, the Faculty of Science has a well-established and successful seminar programme. Frequent seminars provide a collegial environment for round-table discussions and sharing of best-practice in teaching and learning. The seminar programme involves all staff and is supported by the Dean of the Faculty. Staff members who participate are also encouraged to share publications that could inform best practice across disciplines. In the departmental and faculty examples cited above, sessions are well attended and the level of participation and conversation is excellent. In instances where evaluations were conducted, feedback was overwhelmingly positive. However, this may not be the best indicator of the success of the programme. A better indicator may be a review of programme/module learning materials and teaching practice. In the case of STAND, the number of quality publications (accredited, non-accredited as well as PhDs) related to teaching issues may be a better indicator. In addition, STAND and departmental workshops may have beneficial effects of shifting departmental discourses and individual practices which might be evaluated in terms of programmed reviews. A survey and focus group interviews may be conducted with participants in all programmes to gain insight into the extent to which these initiatives influence practice and departmental/faculty culture. Professional development to enhance teaching with technology In conjunction with existing professional training sessions on offer, further professional academic development related specifically to the cyber learning environment was identified which comprises the following:
The 2015, a Staff Survey indicates a continued and increased use of technology for teaching and learning. Technology and our LMS, Blackboard, are used predominantly for communication, administration and information, with an overall indication that 75% of UJ modules are very dependent on the use of technology in teaching and learning. There is also a greater use of technology for the indicators ‘Collaboration’ (particularly for group assignments, up from 8% in 2014 to 22% in 2015) and ‘Transformation’ (particularly in the use of ‘authentic’ or tasks and assessments, currently at 18%), and this indicates that technology is steadily augmenting and transforming traditional classroom practice. Workshops presented by the Centre for Academic Technologies for academic staff and students
Academic staff are keen to assist the students on their journey to ‘learn to be’ by attending these workshops and proof is shown in their increased online presence. Survey results indicated that the workshops were attended by academic staff from various faculties and 94,1% indicated that they found the workshops to be extremely beneficial while 82,4% commented that the presenters were very knowledgeable. Most indicated they would appreciate further workshops to hone their skills even further. Enhancing academics as teachers through mentoring Mentoring relationships between more senior and less experienced staff has been a successful mechanism for professional development at UJ. In the baseline QEP report, reference was made to the role of mentoring relationships within disciplines between junior and senior staff as well as between Academic Development and Support staff and academic staff. Building on this the university introduced the Accelerated Academic Mentoring Programme (AAMP), a new initiative (introduced in 2015) at UJ which is aimed to responding to the challenge of building the next generation of academic leadership and of contributing to transformation in terms of race and gender at professoriate level. While the programme is broad and addresses all developmental aspects of the role of the lecturer, it does have a very strong teaching development component. Its holistic nature is its strength as is the explicit link between on-going professional development and career development. The programme makes available academic mentoring, a developmental programme of workshops, seminars and breakaways, and the availability of funding for teaching relief and international travel. Candidates for the programme are nominated by the Deans of the faculties in terms of talents, capacities and skills, such as leadership potential, academic expertise, commitment, diligence and passion for the strategic goals of the university. Candidates have been placed at three levels of AAMP; each with a co-ordinator: Level 1 - those who have yet to complete a doctorate; Level 2 - staff with a doctorate who are yet to be promoted to associate professor (AP); Level 3 - staff at AP level who seek to advance to full professor. To date approximately 240 staff have been nominated to the programme, with a majority at levels 1 and 2. Staff are supported and given time off to complete tasks that have been identified (in consultation with a mentor) as being important for career development. The periods of absence to complete these tasks are not debited from sabbatical leave. There is no legal requirement for staff who participate to remain in the employ of UJ after completion of the programme. Instead, the university is investigating alternative incentives as part of the university’s overall talent management strategy. All development programmes relating to AAMP are evaluated and given the relative newness of the programmes these are used both to ascertain staff needs in terms of developmental opportunities as well as to evaluate the effectiveness of what is being offered. The goals of the programme are to address the race and gender imbalance at professorial level, and to provide a new cohort of academic leaders and role models, and thus the programme will be evaluated by the number of participants who are promoted over the next 3 -5 years. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Among the varied strategies to enhance conditions for teaching and learning are those relating to the scholarship of teaching and learning. In the last 5 years, UJ staff members have published on SoTL as indicated in the table below:
In some faculties participation in publishing in the SOTL is fairly widespread, and in others, it is dominated by one or at most two people. In some cases there has been a steady growth over the years (in the Science Faculty in 2009 there was one publication v. 23 in 2014) and in others there has been a more steady rate (in FADA 7 outputs in 2009 v. 9 in 2014). In 2014 the Chair in Teaching and Learning initiated a SoTL @ UJ project with a specific focus on social justice, namely, ‘Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: Towards a socially just pedagogy’. This will no doubt make a valuable contribution to addressing issues of access and diversity in teaching and learning. In the SoTL project, SoTL is understood as a teaching and learning strategy which supports academics to become more scholarly, creative and inventive about their own teaching, to share their findings and critical observations with others, and thereby to generate communities of enquiry at the micro and meso levels within faculties and disciplines. The intended outcomes, against which the project will be evaluated are:
In addition to the above, members of the SoTL project will conduct qualitative research on the effectiveness of project in addressing social justice concerns. Workload Model The workload of academic staff typically encompasses a wide variety of duties which includes teaching at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, supervision of postgraduate students, research output, community engagement as well as faculty and departmental administration. One of the strengths of the workload model developed in the Faculty of Education is that while being just and fair, it does take cognizance of staff expertise and experience, and where possible, expressed preference. The Faculty Guidelines suggest that workload allocation at the departmental level is developed through consultation where all members of staff have an opportunity to contribute to the discussion. It also makes provision for staff, especially newly appointed staff, to attend induction programmes and to undertake further studies by allocating them a lighter workload. Given the dynamic nature of academic work, the faculty workload model is revised annually. 2.4 Provide one or more (but not more than 5) exemplars of changes that have not been successful and suggest reasons. Generic workshops offered have been less successful than anticipated. This is indicated by the poor attendance and lack of bookings confirmed for attendance to the workshops, but also by requests of participants in the generic workshops to offer more tailor-made workshops in their departments. Attendance at generic workshops sometimes does not result in demonstrable change in practice. Staff who attend the generic workshops often state that they are unable to implement some of the ideas from the workshop because do not necessarily get support from colleagues in the department who have not attended professional development workshops and are consequently not familiar with the discourse and practices. Staff members also report that when new practices are introduced by individuals, staff and students are more likely to resist these innovations. There is usually more buy-in to experimenting with innovative pedagogies or changing practices when all or most departmental members attend workshops. Despite the success of the discipline-specific workshop, staff capacity in professional academic staff development is limited resulting in an inability of PASD to meet all departmental needs and requests. Individual mentoring/consultation Student and peer feedback is important in informing the professional development needs of individual academics. PASD offers individual mentoring for staff members who have concerns arising from teaching, module and peer evaluation. This is very work-intensive, as it requires individual consultation, and the limited resources of PASD impact negatively on their capacity to provide extensive individual development sessions. In addition, with the change in promotion criteria (discussed earlier) there has been a greater demand on PASD for individual assistance with portfolio development. This is time-consuming and PASD staff members are under great pressure to provide timeous feedback. Supervision development As poor or inadequate supervision has been identified as one of the factors resulting in poor throughput rates, supervisor development has become a priority for the Postgraduate Centre. A multi-pronged approach that includes awareness raising and formal and informal learning opportunities, has been adopted. There is sometimes a lack of understanding that research supervision requires highly-specialised pedagogies. One consequent initiative is to raise awareness of supervision as a specialised form of teaching that requires of the supervisor specific knowledge, skills and values which are not required for undergraduate teaching. Since it is acknowledged that supervisors are often not trained to perform that function, money for mentoring of emerging supervisors by more experienced successful supervisors has been made available through the Department of Higher Education and Training research development grant. However, uptake of this option has been slow. The Postgraduate Supervision Forum, which is organised once every semester, is seen as providing opportunities for faculties to share information and learn from each other. The most recent Forum in 2015 encouraged supervisors who participated to reflect on how to manage plagiarism in postgraduate writing. Formal learning for supervisors has become a new focus. On the strength of positive feedback on the two Strengthening Postgraduate Supervision courses offered in 2014 under the auspices of the Centre for Higher Education Research, Teaching and Learning (CHERTL) at Rhodes University, another course was offered at UJ in 2015. Despite some mixed feedback, and some fall-off in participation during the final contact phase of the course, it was decided that further courses should be offered at UJ in 2016. In order to improve retention of course participants, and positive feedback, it was decided that the academic nature of the course be made clear to potential participants, some of whom appear to prefer a more practical approach to supervision (this is discussed below). Yüklə 278,27 Kb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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