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.?
