Bell Tower

Faculty Development

Faculty Resources

  • Academic Senate: The Senate policies, resolutions, and committees have major influence on instruction. Recent Senate activities include adopting a mission-centered online student ratings form and updating their policy on required contents of syllabi.
  • Archive of hot-links to over 300 useful faculty development sites (MS Excel, 84 KB) compiled by Ed Nuhfer (ed.nuhfer@csuci.edu) and others. The Excel file is in two columns with the topic name in column 1 and the URL hot-link in column 2. Screen reader software should have no problems accessing the links, but the resource sites are from around the world. Some sites may be hosted at institutions, corporations and organizations with varying attention to accessibility issues.
  • California Faculty Association: an invaluable source of information about CSU faculty collective bargaining.
  • Community Service Learning in the CSU (CSL): this organization provides valuable information about service learning in the CSU. Instructions for subscribing to their free monthly electronic newsletter CSU Impact are on this webpage.
  • Consultation with diagnostic survey  with or without in-class videotaping.  Formative diagnostic surveys reveal the students' view of the  presence and degree of presence of instructional traits that research has shown are useful for increasing student learning and student satisfaction. We use a  60-item diagnostic instrument that proves very useful. Diagnoses followed by consultation generate far more instructor gains than do self-interpretations of the survey. The survey can be augmented with simultaneous digital video recording of instructor and student . The videos serve mainly to validate the survey results.  Results of the surveys, consultations, and any video footage made of a class are confidential and remain the property of the instructor. Results are never shared with third parties unless the instructor shares them.
  • Dolphin Gems: This leads to .doc files of contributions of those from on the CI Campus that improve the learning community.
  • Dolphin Morsels: This leads to .doc files that contain the short faculty development Email newsletter that have largely replaced  Riding the Bow Wave and Nutshell Notes (Archives of the latter still exist. See below)
  • Faculty Resource Room: (MS Excel, 6MB) Bell Tower West, Room 1102. Contains books, videos, and publications on Faculty Development. Both  the holdings of CSUCI and the personal collection of the Director are housed there and both are available for use by anyone who teaches CSUCI students. The Faculty Resource Room link currently accesses the old inventory of holdings prepared when the resource room was housed in Malibu Hall. A new inventory is currently in preparation.
  • Focus Groups: These consist of a short 20 - 25-minute exercise that generates very useful data about students' views of what is working, what might be improved, and how students see course learning outcomes as being met. We use a derivation of the focus group format developed at United States Air Force Academy by Dr. Barbara Millis and popularized by publications and presentations by Drs. Millis and Marie Revak. There is probably no classroom assessment technique that provides so much useful information for such a short investment of time. The focus group may be run in your class by either the Director or by a colleague of your choosing. The facilitator guides the focus group activities with a PowerPoint® slide set and uses Excel® and Word® Templates to condense the findings into two or three useful charts. The materials used to conduct the Focus Group are available for download. Download the Focus Group Resource Kit here.
  • Institute for Teaching and Learning (ITL): A CSU organization that seeks to advance teaching and learning. ITL publishes the Exchanges on-line journal and is interested in the submission of manuscripts by faculty members and having faculty members serve as reviewers for manuscripts. ITL also sponsors a listserv that connects CSU colleagues interested in teaching and learning (ITLnet); instructions for subscribing to this listserv are provided on this webpage.
  • Syllabus Support Document (MS Word, 69KB): A Microsoft Word Document (.doc) that outlines materials that the Channel Islands Academic Senate and CSU Policy designate as needing to be in syllabi. Links and text provided in this document greatly shorten syllabus preparation time.

Internet Resources

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