7 Ways the Pandemic Changed Faculty

Development
Pandemic lessons about faculty development should be understood and factored into future
offerings.

Credit: Mikhail Abramov / Shutterstock.com © 2022

The COVID-19 pandemic changed much of how people responsible for faculty development
approach their work in higher education, and many of those changes have been positive. The
lessons learned from remote faculty support should be integrated into future offerings as we chart a
new path for faculty development moving forward.

During the 2021 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference, fifty-two faculty development professionals
from across the United States and abroad gathered to share the lessons they learned during the
previous twenty months of supporting higher education faculty through the pivot to remote
teaching. One of these participants, Holly Zakos, senior instructional technologist at Lehigh
University, pointed out that we "were all struggling with the same issues of dealing with
unprepared faculty and trying to get everyone ramped up to teach online at once. … Now [we're
also] trying to keep up with lessons learned while combating faculty burnout."

In this article, we discuss seven changes in faculty development brought about by the pandemic,
including lessons we have learned at our institutions, examples of how faculty development has
changed, and contributions from participants during the conference session. Our goal with this
article is to ensure that the innovations prompted by this very difficult time are carried forward and
continue to be built upon as we chart a new course for faculty development.

1. Institutional Perspective Shift

As the transition to remote teaching and learning became the main focus of institutions and
workplaces, the skill sets of learning designers became essential to institutional initiatives. The
field experienced a shift in perspectives, both externally and internally. The day-to-day work of a
learning designer became even more diversified. Awareness of the learning design field increased
across all levels: faculty, staff, and especially administration. Learning theories and frameworks
became both essential and recognized as important on a large scale. The skills in social and
emotional intelligence that many designers in the field have so expertly cultivated were imperative
for institutions during this time.

Internally, while creating faculty development offerings, designers had to continually display
empathy to balance faculty burnout, scaffold programming to meet the needs of faculty with wide
ranges of technical skills, and assist in determining individual priorities for each faculty member
creating a virtual learning environment based on their content. While we often do many of these in
our work already, we were forced to deliver new virtual offerings that were timely and available in
an extremely compact time frame. For example, some instructors needed to learn to use video
proficiently to demonstrate ballroom dancing techniques, while others were looking to incorporate
active learning strategies in an online synchronous course. Most instructors had a week or less to
transition their in-person courses to a virtual environment, and almost all needed some type of
training, consultation, or upskilling to do this successfully.

Regarding this perspective shift, conference session participant Lindsay Wood, manager of
instructional design at Penn State Abington, stated, "When reflecting on the impact of pandemic
teaching, those of us working in faculty development and learning design know that there has never
been and likely will never be another opportunity to upskill faculty and improve teaching and
learning so broadly. It's important … to really take a deep dive into how we meet the moment and
ensure the positive changes are lasting. It would be a shame to squander a once-in-a-lifetime
opportunity to adopt innovative practices because we didn't adequately identify the lessons learned
and apply them to the future." This seemed to resonate with many participants; they want to see the
positive changes from the past two years integrated at an institutional level.

2. New and Changed Faculty Development Modalities

Just as each institution's courses needed to pivot to remote instruction, so did many faculty
development offerings. Numerous institutions reported that during the initial shift to remote
instruction, workshops were offered in a variety of ways: remote one-on-one consultations, small
virtual groups, and large Zoom or Microsoft Teams webinars. The size and scope of these offerings
depended on the size of the institutions' faculty development group. Across institutions, sessions
were recorded and given to faculty to quickly scale, which led to upskilling many faculty who were
new to remote or online teaching. In addition, many institutions created resource sites for just-in-
time and reference information for faculty amid the transition to remote instruction. The summer
after the pivot provided many institutions the time to create multi-week synchronous and/or
asynchronous offerings that capitalized on their learning management systems (LMSs).

By fall 2021, despite many institutions' having returned to in-person courses, session participants
overwhelmingly reported that their institutions were continuing to offer online synchronous faculty
development sessions (sometimes to the exclusion of all other modalities). However, a number of
institutions are returning to offering in-person engagements in addition to the new modalities. Part
of this change is a focus on extra planning and coordination, including communication of social
and health norms for each unique session, and many offerings are in a mixed modality, streaming
the sessions to an online audience. While this type of offering took additional planning, keys to
success included embracing the discomfort of in-person interactions—especially with the first few
that were offered in-person—along with reminding both faculty developers and faculty to enjoy the
in-person opportunities when possible.

3. Accessibility and Inclusivity

This shift of dominant modalities for faculty development has been beneficial for a variety of
reasons, most importantly those surrounding accessibility and inclusivity. Online synchronous
sessions boast ease of attendance and increased enrollment, as remote sessions are often more
equitable and accessible to a larger portion of faculty members for a wide variety of reasons (e.g.,
scheduling, disability concerns, and parenting responsibilities). Additionally, many online
synchronous sessions are still being recorded, closed captioned, and shared with faculty who are
unable to attend, increasing accessibility and the potential faculty audience even further by making
these offerings available both synchronously and asynchronously. Some institutions have made
recordings and resources searchable so faculty can easily find what they need. In addition, for those
institutions that created multi-week synchronous and/or asynchronous offerings, these workshop
series are offered regularly once or twice each year, increasing the opportunities for faculty
participation.

4. Content and Delivery Improvements

The change in workshop modalities was not the only shift in the faculty development community.
At some institutions, more faculty voices were incorporated into workshops, creating a platform
where faculty could share best practices and classroom success stories with each other. This
allowed a variety of perspectives to be shared—rather than hearing from just one voice with one
perspective, faculty across institutions were exposed to a variety of teaching strategies from a
multitude of disciplinary content areas. The inclusion of faculty teaching "experts" in these
conversations encouraged social learning opportunities, which often led to more consistent and
lasting changes in teaching practices. Some offerings also focused on student perspectives, such as
incorporating student panels and asking faculty to work through an online student orientation
course.

Incremental learning opportunities became not just good practice but necessary in helping faculty
upskill quickly. Because time was of the essence, faculty development offerings needed to provide
clear standards and directives. Faculty were presented with the bare minimum needed to get started
with teaching online and, later, offered just-in-time training based on feedback and observations.
Creating and providing LMS templates with varying levels of complexity (i.e., beginner,
intermediate, advanced) allowed faculty to focus on content shifts and remote teaching strategies
rather than online resource presentation. Some institutions even created microcredentials that
helped break down large chunks of materials into smaller, more manageable pieces.

Across all institutions, there has been an increased focus on interactivity and the modeling of key
teaching practices within faculty development sessions. The pacing of the participant interactions
within the sessions, which included active learning strategies every 5-7 minutes, was key in many
professional development offerings. This seemed to be consistent across higher education
institutions and can be aligned to one of the most frequently cited papers in educational
psychology, George Miller's "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two," which theorizes
that there is a limit to short-term memory capacity for processing information that includes seven
chunks of information, plus or minus two, at once.Footnote1

Finally, the past two years forced us all to realize the importance of technical fluency in faculty
engagement offerings. As was noted in one Blackboard LMS blog post, "One of the greatest
challenges in the abrupt transition to fully remote learning during the coronavirus pandemic was
the lack of fluency in the tools of teaching online."Footnote2 Although institutions typically offer a
variety of technologies to their instructors in training and onboarding sessions, those sessions are
not always required. We need to rethink the opportunities we provide instructors and staff to
become technically fluent. Instructors who teach online courses are often required to take courses
on the technologies that they use and on the pedagogical applications of those tools, but residential
instructors are not always required to do the same. The pandemic taught us that a lack of
investment in technical fluency for almost all faculty and staff is a costly mistake. As a result, some
institutions are continuing to offer "tech academies" or similar initiatives for new faculty and staff.
5. Rapid Iteration Based on Feedback
The switch to remote teaching forced faculty developers to improve how they gather and
incorporate feedback from workshops and sessions. Because workshops were developed incredibly
quickly (sometimes within only a few days or even hours, rather than weeks or months), an
iterative approach to workshop creation and revision was necessary. About a third of the
participants said that they surveyed faculty, in part to determine what was beneficial about their
offerings but more importantly to identify what could be improved for future workshops. This led
to feedback being integrated into workshop revisions quickly so that the next offering could better
meet faculty needs.

6. Resource Sharing
In many examples discussed during the session, faculty development resources were shared during
the pandemic far more widely than ever before. Instructional designers and faculty developers
created a wide variety of templates (sometimes with varying degrees of complexity, such as
beginner, intermediate, and advanced) for structuring LMSs and syllabi; aligning goals, objectives,
and assessments; digital assessment measures; and other areas of instruction that needed to be
quickly brought online.

The teaching support community has long been known for its collaborative spirit, and the early
days of remote teaching and learning made this more apparent than ever. Over the past two years
we shared ideas, resources, and practical templates with our colleagues to help each other develop
resources at a breakneck pace. This allowed materials to be accessed by more faculty than ever
before, often gathered into central, easily accessible repositories. We have proven that we can come
together not only to share resources with each other but also on national and international levels by
sharing our work on highly visible platforms, such as those provided by EDUCAUSE.

7. Focus on Mental Health and Empathy

Faculty support staff recognized very quickly that they were susceptible to overwork and burnout at
the beginning of the pandemic, just like faculty and students. Over the past two years, we realized
that we need to shift our thinking about productivity and acknowledge the reality that we are living
in a time when many people's lives are consumed with a wide variety of stressors and that the pace
at which many of us were working at the onset of the pandemic is not sustainable. We need to
remember to take vacations, routinely evaluate our workloads, and make adjustments based on
priorities from leadership and encourage our colleagues to do the same. Additionally, we need to
celebrate our (and our faculty's) successes regularly and in real time when possible. This can help
improve morale, but discussions of positive outcomes can also help inform and strengthen
subsequent course iterations.Footnote3

Conclusion
Unsurprisingly, we are not the only faculty developers participating in these discussions. In
"Faculty Development Post COVID-19: A Cross-Atlantic Conversation and Call to Action," the
authors asserted, "In purpose-driven institutions like colleges and universities, all stakeholders need
to be engaged in discussions that determine answers to what is essential in their communities at the
institutional level in response to the challenges resulting from COVID. … Our practical advice is to
offer faculty development programming that acknowledges and accounts for career stages and
work-life issues; creating communities bound less singularly by discipline, institution, or nation but
more purposefully and thematically organized in global communities."Footnote4 Our conversations
with other faculty developers during the 2021 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference epitomized this
idea and made clear that the changes we made to our work over the past two years cannot be
ignored. We cannot—and should not—go "back to normal."

Participants such as Laura Thompson, learning strategies coordinator at Delaware Technical

Community College, enthusiastically shared their experiences and learned from others. She
remarked, "It was refreshing to have an opportunity to exchange ideas. … I realized that I was not
alone in my experiences, and I also developed some thoughts for next steps. A takeaway from this
session was that the questions from the session formed the foundation of a discussion that we had
in-house to assess our past year." Our hope is that we will continue to improve the field of faculty
development collaboratively, incorporating both what we have learned over the past two years and
also what we learn from each other.

Notes
1. George A. Miller, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on
Our Capacity for Processing Information," Psychological Review 63, no. 2 (1956): 81–
97. Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.↩
2. Robert Speed, "4 Ways Education Will Change Post-COVID-19,"

Blackboard Blog, Blackboard, July 27,

2020. Jump back to footnote 2 in the text.↩
3. Dan Donaldson, "The Role of Faculty Development in the Future of Online Education,"

The EvoLLLution, November 27, 2020.

Jump back to footnote 3 in the text.↩
4. Vicki L. Baker and Christel Lutz, "Faculty Development Post COVID-19: A Cross-
Atlantic Conversation and Call to Action,"

The Journal of the Professoriate 12, no.

1 (2021): 55–79. Jump back to footnote 4 in the text.↩

Amy Kuntz is an Instructional Designer, Teaching and Learning with Technology, at the
Pennsylvania State University.
Sara Davis is an Instructional Designer, Teaching and Learning with Technology, at the
Pennsylvania State University.

Erica C. Fleming is the Assistant Director of Teaching and Learning, College of Information
Sciences and Technology, at the Pennsylvania State University.