If all information is available online and the best professors are giving their lectures away for free, do we really need so many faculty members? This questioning underlines our need to redefine the faculty role in a way that advances the goals of liberal education. Rather than merely being repositories of content knowledge, faculty must help students progress along the path to mastering life-long learning. Terminal degrees indicate not only content expertise, but also the transferable learning skills of a master-learner, including synthesis, analysis, evaluation, and creativity. The key faculty roles, then, are mentoring and modeling learning, collaborating with students as they build learning networks, and helping students learn to self-evaluate as they develop the agency to become life-long learners. This session will explore alternate models for understanding the faculty role drawn from digital learning models and strategies for promoting that role at the individual, departmental, and institutional level. It will also examine the role of contingent faculty in this ecosystem. Participants will collaboratively create a toolkit for redefining faculty roles on their own campus.

1. New Faculty Roles in the
Emerging Digital Ecosystem
Rebecca Frost Davis, July 12, 2017

2. New Faculty Role in the Opening Plenary

3. Principles and Practices for
Faculty Leadership
• Promoting shared responsibility
• Aligning policies & procedures
• Engaging faculty and staff
• Building institutional capacity
• Emphasizing high levels of student learning
• Initiating and sustaining change
(Ferren & Paris, Faculty Leadership for Integrative
Liberal Learning, AAC&U, 2015)

4. Instructional Technology
Summer Institute
or
the Challenge of Roles
Misunderstood

5. Barriers
• Timing
– 9-month contracts
– Childcare
• Credit for tenure and promotion
• Teaching evaluations

6. Strategies
• Innovation Fellowship
– http://think.stedwards.edu/instructionaltechnology/
innovationfellowship
• Reschedule Institute to May
• Proposal Framing Teaching Experiment
• Review by Innovations in Teaching Committee

7. Technologist
or
Pedagogical Innovator?

8. What new roles are you
expecting your faculty
colleagues to play?

9. @frostdavis

10. Emerging Digital Ecosystem
• Shaped by networks, which are fundamentally
social;
• Characterized by horizontal access to creation
and production; and
• Increasingly driven by data, algorithms, and
artificial intelligence that personalize information
for users and inform human judgment
“Open and Integrative”, p. 13

11. Design Principles for Digitally
Informed Liberal Education
• Learner Centered
• Networked
• Integrative
• Adaptive
“Open and Integrative”, pp. 53ff.

12. Content
Expert
Learning
Master

15. Experimenter
• IRB proposal
• Grant support
– Presidential excellence grant to develop research
– TLTR grant to purchase equipment
• SoTL group
• Managing Student Expectations
– Transparency in Learning and Teaching Project,
http://www.unlv.edu/provost/transparency

16. Brené Brown

18. Designer.

19. From Campus Technology

20. Data Guru

21. Global Networks

22. Networker

23. Other roles?

24. Discussion
• Each group takes one role/identity.
• What academic structures and cultures are
barriers?
– What about contingent faculty?
• What are effective strategies for attacking those
barriers?
• Report out: Inventory of strategies for use on
your campus

25. Slides and References
• http://rebeccafrostdavis.wordpress.com/
• Twitter:
– @frostdavis
@frostdavis

26. Thank you
St. Edward’s University
Thank you.
St. Edward’s University
Thank you.
St. Edward’s University
Thank you.
St. Edward’s University
Thank you.
St. Edward’s University

27. Intentionality in Problem-
Centered Learning
• “Advancing Underserved Student Success
Through Faculty Intentionality in Problem-
Centered Learning”
• https://www.aacu.org/problemcenteredlearning
• Combine problem-centered learning with
transparency techniques
• Transparency in Learning and Teaching Project,
http://www.unlv.edu/provost/transparency

28. Transparency Methods
• Discuss assignments' learning goals and design
rationale before students begin each assignment
• Invite students to participate in class planning,
agenda construction
• Gauge students’ understanding during class via
peer work on questions that require students to
apply concepts you’ve taught
• Explicitly connect "how people learn" data with
course activities when students struggle at
difficult transition points

29. Transparency Methods (cont.)
• Engage students in applying the grading criteria
that you’ll use on their work
• Debrief graded tests and assignments in class
• Offer running commentary on class discussions,
to indicate what modes of thought or disciplinary
methods are in use