Abstract:

The University of British Columbia Vancouver (UBC-V), home to both campus-wide and Faculty-specific teaching and learning centres, hosts numerous initiatives targeting the improvement of student learning and the student experience. This includes the Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative (Faculty of Science, launched in 2007) and the Flexible Learning Initiative (UBC wide, launched in 2013). Recently, we ran a campus-wide faculty survey to establish baseline information of teaching practices and attitudes and to recognize the conditions leading to change in these practices.

The goal of this survey was to measure the impact of initiatives intended to influence teaching practices, provide data to inform strategic planning of both campus-wide and Faculty specific teaching and learning centres, and to inform a larger research project exploring factors that influence faculty to change teaching practices. Over 1000 faculty with teaching responsibilities across 10 Faculties responded to the survey in the fall 2014.

This session is intended for those who may be interested in running a similar survey at their institution or within their unit. In this session we will discuss the evolution of the survey which started as an instrument developed in 2008 for the Lasting Education, Achieved, and Demonstrated (LEAD) initiative and has since been modified by various institutions in the Bay View Alliance as well as the Association of American Universities. We will also discuss how we achieved campus-wide buy-in which we believe resulted in the high number of responses. We will share the survey instrument, highlighting questions that were particularly useful and discussing areas where further modifications could be helpful. In particular, we will discuss the comments and insights shared by participants around the following issues: the biggest challenges for teaching; changes that could be made at UBC to help faculty teach more effectively; and factors that have improved their teaching. We’ll discuss both actual and potential applications of the data UBC leadership and teaching and learning centres. We will also share and gather feedback around potential future work, including how student perceptions map to faculty perceptions.

Keywords:

Faculty perceptions, challenges, effective teaching.