Interviewing staff who have recently completed their university’s teaching induction program.

 

Dear All

 

The comments on the last two posts have provided lots of very useful questions that we can ask to capture:

1. A snapshot of current teaching induction programs in the Australian higher education sector; and
2. Input from staff who have recently completed a teaching induction program

Both studies will usefully inform that work that the Teaching Induction Fellowship does to develop a national, online teaching induction program.

 

With respect to study 1, I have a list of the contacts for the 29 teaching induction programs that I know exist in the sector. In the not too distant future I will email those contacts to ask if they would be willing to be interviewed by the Fellowship partners.

 

With respect to study 2, I wonder what you think of the following process:

1. Ask those directors of teaching induction programs who chose to participate in study 1 if they would be willing to allow us to contact staff who have recently completed their program (explaining that we would like input from people who are like the audience for our national program).


2. Provide the directors with the questions that we propose to ask their staff.


3. If they agree, ask for a list of staff with their email contact, information about their role (sessional/contract/continuing academic/professional) and their teaching experience (if possible).
4. Contact sessional and non sessional staff who are new to teaching, until we have three staff from each institution who agree to do an interview with us.

Another approach is to develop a survey and ask the directors of teaching induction programs to contact staff from their latest cohort and ask them to complete the survey. While I like the latter approach I suspect that we may get few responses.

 

Cheers

 

Kym

What do staff new to teaching want/need from a teaching induction program?

As well as talking with program directors of teaching induction programs about their programs, it might be useful, if we could get permission to do so, to talk with some staff who have completed a teaching induction program recently to find out what they valued and what else they would have liked their program to cover.

I like the idea of having this input to consider when we develop our national LTIP.

While we could ask many questions, we aren't setting out to evaluate the teaching induction program that these staff have taken. We want to know what the intended audience of LTIP would value in such a program as we will build.

Below are just a couple of questions and I would be interested for your thoughts on if we should ask anything further and if so what.

Also, should we also interview some staff who are new to teaching and who haven't enrolled in a teaching induction program?

Cheers

Kym

 

Demographic info - teaching experience, age, casual/contract/part time, research student/research and teaching/teaching only + clinical practitioners?

1. Tell me about your experience of completing your university's teaching induction program?
2. What were some of the strengths of the program? Or What did you find most valuable about the program?
3. Tell me about a key moment for you in the program.
4. Is there anything else that you would like to see covered in the program?
5. Is there anything about the program that you would like to see changed?
6. Was the program long enough? Too long?

What do staff new to teaching want/need from a teaching induction program?

As well as talking with program directors of teaching induction programs about their programs, it might be useful, if we could get permission to do so, to talk with some staff who have completed a teaching induction program recently to find out what they valued and what else they would have liked their program to cover.

I like the idea of having this input to consider when we develop our national LTIP.

While we could ask many questions, we aren't setting out to evaluate the teaching induction program that these staff have taken. We want to know what the intended audience of LTIP would value in such a program as we will build.

Below are just a couple of questions and I would be interested for your thoughts on if we should ask anything further and if so what.

Also, should we also interview some staff who are new to teaching and who haven't enrolled in a teaching induction program?

Cheers

Kym

 

Demographic info - teaching experience, age, casual/contract/part time, research student/research and teaching/teaching only + clinical practitioners?

1. Tell me about your experience of completing your university's teaching induction program?
2. What were some of the strengths of the program? Or What did you find most valuable about the program?
3. Tell me about a key moment for you in the program.
4. Is there anything else that you would like to see covered in the program?
5. Is there anything about the program that you would like to see changed?
6. Was the program long enough? Too long?

Constructing a snap shot of teaching induction provision in Australian higher education

Dear Colleagues

Yesterday was the official start of the Teaching Induction Fellowship and so the journey begins.

To inform the development of our national teaching induction program, it will be helpful if we could construct a snapshot of current teaching induction provision in the sector. To do this, I am in the process of developing a list of colleagues who teach/have developed a program for their institution.

I propose that through this post we discuss the questions that we might ask those colleagues in order to usefully describe their program and which would help inform the program that we will develop. Below are some questions to kick start this discussion.

What other questions would you like us to ask?

What changes to these questions would you suggest?

We are keen to have comments and suggestions from across the sector so even if you aren't a Fellowship partner, please do contribute to the discussion.

I look forward to ourquestions taking shape in the near future.

Cheers

Kym

Snapshot of teaching induction in the Australian Higher Education sector in 2016

The questions below are specific to centrally taught teaching induction programs for higher education.

 
1) Mode of delivery - Online only, blended, f-t-f; workshops?

2   2) How long is your program?

3   3) How many participants enrolled in your program in the first half of 2016? How many completed it?

     4) How many times a year is your program offered?

     5) When is your program available? – all year, prior to teaching, during teaching etc

     6) Is there a specific question that we want to ask about any flexibility in the program?

     7) Who can enrol in your program – new staff, staff who aren’t new, sessional staff, research students, professional staff, contract academics, continuing academics, teaching only, colleagues at offshore locations?

     8) compulsory or not and if so, for whom? If not, do you know what percentage of new teaching staff attended your program this year?

     9) Is your program underpinned by a particular philosophy/pedagogy?

   10) We could have a list of topics and ask the program coordinator to indicate which topics are covered and if they cover others not in the list – eg teaching online, how to lecture, how to teach a tutorial, test construction and lots of other topics.

1   11) Do you assess in any way?

1   12)  Is it your perception that your participants usually find the program valuable and what do you perceive are the top three things that participants find valuable?

1    13)  Is peer observation included in your program?

1    14)  Does your program provide equivalent credit for a unit in a graduate certificate in higher education learning and teaching? Or partial credit to a unit?

      15)  Are there incentives or time release for staff to do this program?

      16)  Do people other than yourself teach into the program and if so, how many and what is their time commitment? What percentage of your time goes into teaching the program?

      17)  Are participants in your program also provided a mentor through the program?

      18)  In what ways do you evaluate the effectiveness/value of the teaching induction program?

     19)  How long has the program operated, and how long has this version operated?

     20)  How often is the program reviewed and how often do you do a major revision of the program.

     21)  What are the most challenging issues for you in teaching/providing this program?

     22)  What would you like to see in the teaching induction program that isn’t there or what change would you like to see to the program?

     23)  Is your program funded centrally from a specific budget or is it part of the remit of your central unit without specific funding tied to it? (any other questions about funding?)

     24)  Does any senior executive support the program by taking part in it?

     25)  How is the program advertised? – website, in employment packs distributed by HR to new staff, emails sent specifically to new staff?

     26)  Anything else that you would like to tell us about your program?

Do we need any demographic data – eg size of full time equivalent HE student cohort, (can be difficult for people to find out how many teaching staff exist), regional/metropolitan uni.?