Frontiers in Faculty Development: Faculty Learning Communities to Enhance Technology‐driven Teaching for Healthcare Education

Abstract

Faculty Learning Communities (FLCs) are voluntary faculty communes to share expertise, skills, and strategies facilitating self‐directed life‐long learning and constitute an interactive faculty development mechanism. Faculty development programs ensure faculty readiness, continued improvement in skills and strategies, and the creation of a positive, self‐directed, self‐sustaining and collegial work environment. Therefore, faculty development is included in accreditation standards for healthcare education degree granting programs. FLCs offer a social and easy‐to‐integrate platform for creating hands‐on faculty development programs. FLCs allow sharing of skills and strategies and directly enhance teaching by going beyond a regular “seminar” design through encouraging attendee faculty to adapt their course to incorporate the strategies being discussed. FLCs are usually run as a continuous faculty‐led course which culminates with attendees showcasing how they adapted the discussed strategy for their teaching. We implemented a summer 2019 FLC to promote technology usage in healthcare education across the California Northstate University colleges of Pharmacy, Medicine, Psychology, Dental Medicine and Health Sciences, our undergraduate program. Our six‐week long FLC included participation of 26 faculty from these colleges in implementing course design principles and techniques for creating hybrid and online class content, particularly focused on foundational sciences such as pharmacology. There were six two‐hour long sessions led by experts in topics such as “elements of hybrid course design”, “use of Active Presenter to create interactive lecture videos”, “assessment strategies for online and hybrid courses”, “communication strategies for hybrid and online courses: challenges and opportunities”, with each session divided into an hour‐long lecture followed by participating faculty working with experts to incorporate technological ideas into their existing courses. The FLC itself was designed as a blended course with resources available through Canvas and online follow‐up time provided to help attendees complete “home‐work” assignments, which typically consisted of completing the next phase of their developing course. A final session was reserved for participants to present courses in their respective disciplines that incorporated learning from the FLC. We adapted the SALG instrument with 45 questions to survey perception of the FLC. The response rate was 41%, with 80% respondents indicating that the FLC enabled 1) examination of the design, potential usage and steps for the implementation of online and hybrid technology platforms in their teaching, and 2) identification of an area of technology‐assisted or distance learning to incorporate into their teaching, while 90% felt that the session facilitators 3) demonstrated expertise in their subject matter and 4) were responsive to questions, comments and opinions. Suggested areas of improvement included time and resource allocation. Overall, the FLC facilitated awareness of university programs and enhanced technology usage in curricular design.