Standard III. Faculty

III.2 The school demonstrates the high priority it attaches to teaching, research, and service by its appointments and promotions; by encouragement of innovation in teaching, research, and service; and through provision of a stimulating learning and research environment.

The iSchool and the University endeavor to support and reward faculty for all of their scholarly accomplishments and contributions, wherever they fall within the teaching-research-service spectrum.

Recognition

In 2007, the School’s approach to the evaluation of faculty accomplishments and workload was significantly revised. In part, this was due to the dichotomy that exists when a professional graduate program resides in a research university. As an AAU-member university, Pitt values the research activities and contributions of faculty. However, as a professional graduate school, SIS depends on strong teaching skills and rigorous courses offered by full-time, regular faculty. In order to balance faculty workloads and recognize the varied contributions that each faculty member brings to the School, the Dean and Associate Dean, with considerable input from the faculty, created a parametric faculty model that accounts for all normal teaching, research, and service activities. In this model, teaching is recognized as much as research. Service to the school, the university and the professions is also rewarded. Faculty members’ annual reports account for the full range of their teaching, course development, research and service activities. The Dean builds a parametric model for each faculty member, based on their reports and on the University’s records (e.g., Peoplesoft for teaching loads). The model weights contributions across all three domains – research, teaching, and service, providing a consistent and equitable analysis of the workloads and accomplishments of all faculty in the School. In addition, the model recognizes the various appropriate publication venues specific to each discipline. Faculty merit increases, as well as other incentives, are allocated based on performance as assessed in the model. The restructured annual review process also factors into promotion and tenure cases.

The revised annual faculty review process provides considerable feedback regarding the prior year’s work, including a comparison of each faculty member’s workloads and productivity to their colleagues. Faculty members, as part of this process, also submit a plan for the forthcoming year, aligning their individual goals and objectives to those of the School and the LIS program. This self-reflective process has led to individual faculty collaborating with other faculty in both research and teaching, with enhanced knowledge about how to prepare for promotion and tenure. The faculty has found this metric-based model to be objective and effective, extending beyond subjective assessments and student teaching evaluations to provide substantial detail of performance that can be used for planning and to identify areas needing improvement.

Within the iSchool, tenure stream faculty members are offered assistance in developing their expertise and scholarly credentials and in enhancing their teaching. Tenured faculty help newer colleagues through collaboration on joint proposals, review of journal and conference papers, and encouraging and assisting the tenure stream faculty member in acquiring University committee appointments. As reported in the 2006 COA Program Assessment, the School has experimented with alternatives for mentoring and for fostering collaborative work in both research and teaching. The efforts to do this have resulted in newly hired faculty working with senior faculty on both grants and scholarly papers, evidence of which can be seen in the list of faculty publications (see Appendix FAC 3), even as such collaboration has remained largely informal.

Support for Teaching Innovation and Excellence

As stated in the last COA report, the increased use of technology in the curriculum, especially with the online program, has led to faculty enhancements in instructional design, especially as this goes with other resources such as labs and graduate student support. The University’s Faculty Instructional Development Lab (FIDL), for example, is a facility dedicated to supporting the instructional development needs of Pitt faculty. The facility provides faculty with the opportunity to investigate and apply instructional theory, learning theory, information and multimedia technologies to instructional development projects. The transition to the Pitt Online platform, utilizing a different configuration of instructional design and technologies, will foster more efforts and enhancements in online instructional design and delivery. For example, courses presented as part of the Pitt Online program are designed by the faculty member supported by a team of specialists in instructional design and online pedagogy.

Teaching effectiveness has always been highly valued in the iSchool’s academic programs. New faculty members, along with current PhD students, typically complete a course in instructional design offered by the University’s Center for Instructional Design and Distance Education (CIDDE). This Center is also available on an as-needed basis to revise and improve courses, course materials, and delivery techniques to ensure that the faculty feel comfortable in the classroom and gain knowledge on the most current developments in teaching and learning. For example, faculty can arrange individual consultations with CIDDE experts and take advantage of their resources and tools when designing a new course or undertaking a major revision of an existing course.

The School also provides financial resources to support teaching in terms of teaching assistants and teaching fellows. Teaching assistants are utilized in courses with significant enrollments and/or multiple sections. They help with grading, advising, in-class exercises and hands-on learning opportunities, and outside the classroom interactions. In general, teaching assistant positions are given to early-stage doctoral students to introduce them to the rigors of teaching and advising.

All faculty and instructors teaching at the iSchool are required to request student evaluations of their courses through the University’s Office of Measurement and Evaluation of Teaching (OMET). These assessments, conducted confidentially and in-class, garner student ratings and comments that provide faculty with essential, timely feedback on the effectiveness of the course and the teaching methods. A summary of the OMET results for each faculty member are provided to the Dean and the relevant Program Chair.

All iSchool faculty members participate in the School’s Peer Review of Teaching (PRT) scheme, to ensure continuous improvement and consistency in course delivery. Tenure stream faculty are reviewed three times prior to tenure, while tenured faculty undergo the review approximately every four years.

Peer Review of Teaching Process

 

Request Student Evaluation of Courses

Submit Student Evaluations, both OMET scores and all students’ comments

Submit Full Dossier to SIS PRT Committee

Update
Dossier

Undergo Peer Review of Teaching

Tenured Faculty

Every course

Every course
(to Dean)

Every 4 years;
update OMET evaluations and comments annually

Annually

Every 4 years

Tenure-Track
Faculty

Every course

Every course
(to Program Chair and Dean)

2nd year

Annually

2nd, 3rd and
5th years

Non-Tenure- Track Faculty

Every course

Every course
(to Program Chair)

Upon request

Annually

At least every 4 years

The PRT calls for the faculty member to prepare a substantial dossier for a course of their choosing, which is accompanied by a statement of the faculty member’s teaching goals and philosophy. The dossier is then evaluated by a standing PRT committee. Results of the PRT process are submitted to the Dean and considered in the promotion and tenure processes. Perhaps more importantly, this process provides expert feedback from those with many years of experience in teaching in a professional degree program.

In recent years, several faculty and adjuncts have been recognized for their teaching innovations or excellence. The WISE consortium offers an award to faculty to recognize their online teaching innovations and excellence. In 2011, Ellen Detlefsen and Adele Barsh were recipients; Mary Kay Biagini, Bernadette Callery, and Ellen Detlefsen were honored in 2008; and Ellen Detlefsen received the award in 2007.  Leanne Bowler received the 2012 ALISE/Pratt-Severn Faculty Innovation Award, which is designed to “identify innovation by full-time faculty members … in incorporating evolving information technologies in the curricula” of accredited MLIS programs.  For her proposal, Bowler described several innovative teaching practices that she implemented in her course on Technology in the Lives of Children and Youth.  These technology-based learning activities were designed to facilitate students investigating the use of new technologies, determining how libraries can use technology to enhance the traditional mission of promoting literacy, and evaluating how technology affects young people’s cognitive and social development.

A grant from the Provost’s Advisory Council on Instructional Excellence supported the “Information Professionals and Student Interactions” project supervised by Christinger Tomer, Associate Professor, and Susan Alman, Director of Distance Education and Outreach. The goal of the project was to produce video presentations of alumni discussing their professional experiences and providing specific advice on theoretical topics and fields of practice covered in the LIS 2000 (Understanding Information) course so that students in the course would have the opportunity to interact with the alumni guest speakers through asynchronous Blackboard discussion forums.  This project has created resources that are enabling current and future students to develop professional insights and skills beyond the traditional classroom experience.

At the iSchool, great efforts are made in preparing future educators to be effective teachers as well. All doctoral students in the LIS program are required to take a teaching practicum (with a faculty advisor) and the University’s instructional design course. The practicum allows the doctoral student the opportunity to be involved in curriculum design and instruction in preparation for an academic career. Doctoral students have become more active in teaching with faculty, as well as designing and teaching courses on their own. For example, several doctoral students have worked with faculty in teaching existing courses and then progressed to designing and teaching their own courses on specialist topics as Summer term electives for the APRM specialization. An added bonus is that the master’s students learn a lot more about doctoral students and their research agenda, enriching the MLIS curriculum in significant ways. All doctoral students are required to take the LIS 3000 seminar, Introduction to Doctoral Studies, which is now focused on “Academic Culture and Practice.” This unique course stresses not just the principal responsibilities of teaching, research, and service, but it orients students to the changing nature of the modern university. Richard Cox argues the importance of such a course in his paper “The most important question of all: How do we prepare the next generation of faculty in LIS and iSchools?” presented as part of the Controversies in LIS Classroom section of the 2013 ALISE Conference.

Faculty members are advocates for demonstrating a synergy between research and teaching. Some courses, at both the masters and doctoral levels, are designed both to provide basic and advanced education in the requisite knowledge in the information professions and to assist in research projects. Richard Cox, for example, has edited two special issues of professional journals comprised of student papers from MLIS classes in the APRM area. Christinger Tomer incorporated the results of his return on investment in libraries (ROI) research into his introductory information technology coursework, while Daqing He features his research (as well as the research of others) on cross-lingual information systems into his coursework on information retrieval.

Support for Research

The School regularly provides graduate student assistants (GSAs/GSRs) to support a faculty member’s research-related projects. This provides invaluable experience to the students, as they gain research skills and an in-depth knowledge of the subject area. It also provides the faculty member with critical and competent assistance in several key areas including proposal development, programming or methodological tasks, and literature review. New tenure-stream faculty members receive, as part of their hiring package, reduced course loads and additional GSA support in their early stages to help them develop their research program as a junior faculty member.

Dedication of student time and effort to support research also benefits the student.  In many cases, such work results in publications (co-authored with faculty) which will enhance the students’ resumes or CVs. For example, Leanne Bowler, Jung Sun Oh and Daqing He published a conference paper on “Eating Disorder Questions in Yahoo! Answers” Information, Conversation, or Reflection?” (ASIS&T 2012 Annual Meeting). Daqing He published an article in the Journal of Information Science on “The state of iSchools: an analysis on academic research and graduate education” with several of his research assistants (Journal of Information Science, 38 (1). pp. 15-36.  

Each year, the Dean allocates additional financial and physical resources to support research projects within the School. Research Discretionary Funds (RDF) are used to support travel to conferences, student research assistantships, and purchases of equipment, for example. There are also designated travel funds to assure that every regular faculty member has the opportunity to attend and participate in scholarly conferences and professional development opportunities. Faculty members can also submit special requests to the Dean for additional travel funds as necessary to enable participation in important conferences where they are presenting their work.

Several research projects have benefitted from more substantial support in terms of lab space or equipment purchases. In order to foster a team-approach to research, several spaces throughout the iSchool have been designated as specific lab spaces including the Usability lab, the Information Assurance lab, and the Information Retrieval, Integration and Synthesis lab, under the direction of Daqing He.

The success of these efforts may be seen in the number of grant awards and recognitions recently extended to the program faculty. A complete list is included in Appendix FAC 2, but some of the highlights include:

  • Assistant Professor Leanne Bowler was successful in acquiring funding from the Central Research Development Fund to support a pilot study to examine the efficacy of design-based research methods in revealing adolescent metacognitive thinking during the information search process. Even though adolescents have a vast number of information resources at their fingertips, they are – according to the literature – only adequate information seekers and in fact could use some guidance in terms of best practices. By creating a framework for investigating adolescent metacognitive knowledge during the information search process, Bowler aims to clarify the processes through which young people find and assess information.
  • Associate Professor Daqing He received a $49,983 grant from the National Science Foundation’s Division of Information & Intelligent Systems to explore the emerging phenomenon of public academic information resources on the social web. The project aims to develop an assessment and association identification framework for online academic information, to facilitate researchers in accessing, organizing, utilizing, and exchanging all types of academic information.
  • Associate Professor Mary Kay Biagini and Rebecca Morris (PhD 2011) were awarded a grant from the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) to investigate how school librarian preparation programs incorporate various national standards into their curriculum and identify best practices.
  • Former LIS faculty, Assistant Professor Cory Knobel and Professor Geoffrey Bowker were awarded a $198,506 grant (while at Pitt) from NSF’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure,  “Evaluating Best Practices in Collaborative Cyber-Science and Engineering.” This project will result in a socio-technically informed set of outcome-based best practices and evaluation criteria for large-scale cyber-science efforts. The goal is to create a framework to transform cyber-enabled grand challenge communities, improve the ability to identify and assess categories of project impact across levels of scale, and guide future development of appropriate cyberinfrastructure tools.

Building a Vibrant and Collaborative Environment

Teaching and research support are buttressed by the School’s efforts to create a vibrant working and learning environment. The School hosts dozens of colloquia each year, addressing leading edge topics of interest to faculty and students in the iSchool. There are subject-specific lecture events in Information Assurance, Digital Libraries, Telecommunications, Archives, and the impact of technology on scholarship. One series, the iSchool Colloquium Series, offers a panoply of expert researchers and speakers on topics ranging from social networking and online collaboration to organizing literary works. In the future, the School will host the Bernadette Callery Memorial Lecture Series, which will address current issues and concerns in the areas of archives and records management.

A distinctive feature of the iSchool is the weekly “Brown Bag” lunch hosted by the Dean to provide an informal venue for discussion of research areas or teaching issues of interest to faculty. Topics may be suggested by any faculty member, who then introduces the discussion. These regular meetings provide an excellent opportunity for informal interaction and sharing of multidisciplinary perspectives on emerging fields of interest across the School. The iSchool also hosts regular workshops on various research topics within the school, to enable faculty and students to learn about their colleagues’ work and teaching interests. An underlying benefit of all these activities is to foster cross-disciplinary and cross-program research programs. A complete list of colloquia and workshops for Fall 2012 is included in
Appendix SCH 9.

 

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