Hello, I am Rosemary Tyrrell, the Director of Faculty Development at the UCR School of Medicine. I have been teaching for over 20 years. I have taught both face-to-face and online courses. I have also been doing faculty professional development for over 15 of those years. About a year and a half ago I had the extreme pleasure to join the UCR School of Medicine as the Director of Faculty Development. I had no shortage of advice on what kinds of workshops I should be offering and it wasn’t long before I had a roster of about a dozen workshops ready to go. Inclusive Teaching Strategies 1
The problem? I used to be in the theatre and there was an expression we used. Inclusive Teaching Strategies 2
Butts in the seat. Some workshops would get 15-20 people, but others would get only a half dozen or even less. I started to look at what we could do differently. That’s what this session is about. What we did differently and lessons we learned along that path. Inclusive Teaching Strategies 3
By the end of this session you should be able to: • Explore the challenges of reaching faculty • Compare approaches to faculty development • Develop ideas for increasing attendance Note: This is like Vegas – anything said here will stay here. We ask that anything you share about your institution or challenges you face remain in this room. Inclusive Teaching Strategies 4
What reasons do faculty give for why they don’t attend your programs? What do you think the #1 reason faculty give is? Inclusive Teaching Strategies 5
Time! How true is this? Well, of course it’s true. Everyone is busy. Everyone is over-taxed when it comes to time. Sometimes there are schedule conflicts that make it simply impossible for people to attend. So, all of that is true. Time can be a barrier. But is it the real reason ? People seem to find or make time for the things they see as important. Inclusive Teaching Strategies 6
The problem isn’t time – the problem is the perception that the programs aren’t worth the time. It comes down to – value for the time spent. Once upon a time I was in graduate school in theater. Every year a few grad students were selected to put on a production as part of a series called Potpourri. The students got the great idea of asking the faculty if we could eliminate the ticket price and make the program free. Our professor vetoed the idea and told us something that has always stuck. “If you say your show is worth nothing, that’s just what people will think.” We sometimes undersell our programs in an attempt to make them “convenient” or “not too time consuming” because whenever you ask faculty what prevents them from attending – again - what the one thing they always say???? No time!!! What they are really saying (in most cases) is that they don’t think that it is worth their time. It’s not worth giving up time to grade papers, meet with students, spend with their family, eat lunch, or a 1000 other things they will do instead of attending your session. If we follow Alice down the rabbit hole of “no time”, it leads us to try shorter and shorter programs in the vain attempt to make them more “convenient” for faculty. However, we may find that it doesn’t necessarily improve attendance. Inclusive Teaching Strategies 7
Challenges: What are some of the challenges you face getting faculty to attend your faculty development sessions? We face: • As we discussed, time is sometimes an issue, so choosing a good time is important. Clinical hours makes it next to impossible to get clinical faculty to attend anything during the day. • Sometimes, it’s geography compounded with time. If a faculty member isn’t on campus the day you are doing your program, it’s a higher bar to meet to have them make a special trip out for that purpose. If they have to pay for parking, it’s an even higher bar! • Our faculty are geographically dispersed throughout three large counties, so asking them to come to campus is a big ask. • Many clinical faculty don’t see their role as teacher as part of their professional identity. It’s very much a side-line, and they sometimes treat it that way. Inclusive Teaching Strategies 8
So, this session is entitled Workshops, Webinars and Podcasts, so let’s talk about the different approaches we have tried. Inclusive Teaching Strategies 9
Workshops: What are some challenges you face getting people to attend workshops? Our challenges: • Difficult to find a time that works. • Not a lot of faculty were signing up • Of those who did sign up, only about 50% of them showed up. This meant that we were spending money on catering for people who weren’t there. Inclusive Teaching Strategies 10
We have done webinars with some success. Some challenges you have had trying webinars? • I had an experience where I was in Philadelphia while we were doing a webinar in Riverside. I was literally sitting in front of Independence Hall on a bench trying to resolve technical difficulties to get the webinar launched. Fun! At first, we were only getting 1-3 people attending. We essentially outnumbered the attendees. Not a good sign. I tried something different with the invite that has made a big difference. Originally, we were sending them the webinar link (which is how most webinars seem to operate), but they were trying to “register” the way they do for our face-to-face sessions, and they were getting error messages telling them the meeting hadn’t started yet – which it hadn’t. Since many of them were unfamiliar with virtual meetings, they didn’t realize you don’t have to register in advance the way you do for a workshop (particularly if there is to be a meal served). So, they were confused that they couldn’t sign up for the webinar. So, what I did was to use the same RSVP system we use for our other programs – which is Eventbrite. How many of you use Eventbrite? Familiar with it? If you aren’t it’s a super-easy free (at least for now) reservation system. They keep sending “surveys” talking about different pricing options, so some features may not be free much longer, but right now if you don’t charge for your event – it’s free. I don’t know what it costs if you do charge because we don’t do any programs that cost money. Eventbrite has a great feature where you can pre-write all the emails you want registrants to receive, so we added emails 24 hours before and then again the morning of the noon- time session with explicit instructions on how to log into the meeting. What do you think the result was when I used Eventbrite? - I increased attendance by over 400% using this new method. Inclusive Teaching Strategies 11
Podcasts I should have titled this session “From Workshops to Webinars to Playlists to Podcasts” because what we are currently doing are not podcasts, but in fact playlists on YouTube. What we will do this year is add podcasts. Our podcasts style recordings have happened quite by accident. We had one webinar where no one showed up to attend. Since the webinar was part of a year-long pilot study, we didn’t want to simply cancel because we had given the study participants the option of attending the webinars live or watching a recording of them at another time. So, we ended up talking to each other instead of the audience (because we didn’t have an audience) and it worked quite well. We are now planning a series of podcasts that we will do in addition to the webinars and subsequent recordings of them. I have a fellow starting in August who will be working on this project. Inclusive Teaching Strategies 12
A short workshop or webinar may come across as more “convenient” to many of us, but it also may seem like there isn’t much that can be learned in so short a time span, so for the faculty member, they seem to devalue it. The Teaching Excellence Academy is the premiere/apex program for the Office of Faculty Development. It is a competitive, longitudinal faculty development program. The Teaching Excellence Academy is an interesting phenomenon. We sometimes have difficulty getting even five people signed up for a workshop, but we have announced a new program which will begin in October. It’s a longitudinal faculty development program that requires far more commitment of time and resources than anything else we offer. It is a competitive program, and we already have twice the number of people who have signed up to receive “updates” than we can accommodate in the actual program – and we don’t start official recruitment until July! So, the idea that making something shorter and/or easier will make it better attended does not hold up. We intended this program to be competitive, and it is going to be. I just did a presentation to our GME faculty last week and I could see when I said it was going to be a highly competitive program, ears perked up and we had several more people fill out the “interest” form by the time we got back to the office. Now, signing up to receive information and signing up for the program are admittedly two different things, but it’s clear that the idea of a program with a greater time commitment was not a deal- breaker for many. The perception of value increased. Teaching Excellence Academy Presentation 13
Activity On the other side of the sheet (or on post-its – one item per post-it), please list methods you have tried to increase attendance. Select the top three that have been the most successful for you. Share with the group Inclusive Teaching Strategies 14
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