QUALITY ASSURANCE IN HIGHER EDUCATION: FACULTY DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMS

The challenges of a rapidly changing society are acutely felt in many domains including higher education. This pressure strongly persuade the universities to focus on the quality of their faculty and to offer them an appropriate service education. But, the efficiency of any institutional professional development program really increases if it addresses the specific needs, knowledge and priorities expressed by the teaching staff. Therefore the present study presents the results of the faculty development needs assessment survey conducted in 4 Romanian universities. This survey was followed by another study focused on cognitive - emotive – behavioural profile of experts faculty. The findings show differences in the professional development needs perceived by different subgroups of faculty. Early career teaching members are more oriented towards teaching skills improvement and development plans, while tenured faculty are rather interested in their research skills development. Besides this, faculty members from social science departments tend to give a higher rate for teaching development strategies than their colleges in science fields. The study highlights the requirements of the faculty development programs that must be adapted to the specific needs of the faculty subgroups, according to their professional goals, their career trajectory level, teaching experience, or their specialization department. Additionally, from the second study, we have found that faculty’s professional performance strongly depend on their personal dimensions (cognitive, emotive and specific behaviour). Based on these results we are working now on larger project guided by the following objectives: a. to design a teaching expertise model for higher education; b. to develop a special training program for university staff taking into account the above mentioned factors; c. to asses the validity of our model by implementing the program in three major Romanian university.