- Hello again. I'm Eddie Watson. I'm the Associate Vice President for Curricular and Pedagogical Innovation at the American Association of Colleges and Universities. And I'm here with my partner in crime, Chris. Chris, you wanna say hello?

- Hi, Chris Hakala, Director for the Center for Excellence in Teaching Learning and Scholarship and Professor of Psychology at Springfield College.

- Well, Chris and I are excited to have our guest with us today, who is Dr. Michele DiPietro. I think I got the name right this time. He is the Executive Director for Faculty Development, Recognition, and the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the Kennesaw State University, which is located in Kennesaw, Georgia. He and I crossed paths a few times whenever I was the Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Georgia. So I'm really excited that we're able to reconnect and have this conversation. We have three questions for Michele, and we're really excited to hear what he has to share with us in response to these questions. I guess I'll just jump right in if it's okay. Michele, you have, you know, your center's a little bit on the larger side. I mean, you have some staff that work with you. I guess we wanted to start off with just maybe a question about that challenge of delegating to staff. I mean, you have a lot of opportunities and also I'm sure sort of unfunded mandates that come your way. How do you decide what to do yourself and what to then maybe alternatively delegate to those who work with and for you?

- Sure. Hi, great to be here. Great to chat with both of you. Those are interesting questions. So, just to give a little bit of context, my center has about 10 to 12 people, full and halftime, faculty and staff. And we have been short staffed since, I'm gonna say since the pandemic for sure. We have, right now we have more searches than people actually in the center going on. So that's how short staffed we are. So in terms of delegating right now, there is not a whole lot of... speaking as a statistician ... the problem does not have a lot of degrees of freedom. But in the idea when we're fully staffed, and we have a couple different processes to help us decide who does what. We start from the bottom side, we start with the people that we have. What is their expertise? Both disciplinary, and so therefore, we have an engineer. Other engineers like to hear from an engineer, for instance. So if those are the opportunities, maybe that's a natural fit. We also start with their expertise in faculty development. Somebody might be more of an expert in TILT, somebody might be more an expert in Team-Based Learning and so on and so forth. And so that's another way of dividing up the work. And so to some people have interests and passions, topics that they naturally gravitate toward. From the top side, we are receiving, like you said, a lot of non-funded mandates, lots of priorities. And so in terms of how we decide who does what, it's about looking at the impact that we can have. And so some initiatives come down from the University System of Georgia, which means it's a high level priority that the whole state of Georgia cares about. Of course, we're going to put, you know, a lot of resources behind those to make sure that both we're in compliance and B, that we are in alignment and we're, you know, having the same direction as the whole system. Some initiatives are at the university level, some initiatives are received by the colleges. We have a mechanism to solicit and receive custom-based workshops, custom workshops from the colleges. And, in fact, we have been prioritising those more than university-wide workshops. We've actually been offering a little less of those opportunities to make room in our partly because of the short staffing issue. But partly as a strategy, we want to go where we're invited, and we want to receive more invitations so that we can tailor our content to the disciplines with the examples with the classroom exemplar, et cetera, et cetera. And so we solicit those. Once a semester, we are able to see the spectrum of what people are requesting of us. And unsurprisingly, there's pockets, there's diamond heads that are... We got a request from one college requesting eight workshops. Can we do eight workshops in one semester for that one college? Could we guarantee that level of service for our colleges? No, we can't, and so we now negotiate, but also the other colleges are not asking us eight workshops. So it kinda works out. But today is actually the day that I'm going to sit down with my Director of Scholarly Teaching and look at all at those requests to decide who we've been working with. What is work that we really want to follow up on because we've seen the promise of it and we've seen some of the, you know, the early fruits, the dividends that are starting to pay, what is some work that we want to nurture and plant seeds in certain areas? What is some that is just overkill at this point? We're overwhelmed maybe in some ways. And we never say no. We might say we'll get to you next semester kind of thing. By next semester we'll have all the hires in place, right? So we'll be in a much different position. But those-

- So it sounds like you had a deadline for the call, right? Like not not just a partnership program on your website, but hey, this is the date to submit these proposals so that you could then plan. Is that correct?

- That is correct. For a couple different reasons. One is that when they come, you know, it's easier to accommodate something or to negotiate what we can accommodate if we have the full spectrum versus if something comes in mid-semester and we've already committed most of our time, then we just, at that point, there's, I hate saying no. And sometimes that what ends up happening. But the other thing is that the university is implementing a new system where they're reviewing all the offerings in terms of trainings, not just at CTL, but from all their units. And so we really need to know what we're committing, what PowerPoint we're creating, because we needed to be submitted well in advance so that it's sort of, you know, informed how we're doing things now as well.

- Okay. Well thanks so much for that. Chris, you've got the next question.

- Yeah, so Michele, first off, that was really interesting. And I think what's surprising is how, I know we have a lot of faculty, so you have a lot of these requests coming in across the different schools, and as you're collecting those requests and you're thinking about it, one of the things that they wanna see at the other end is how you are recording and capturing the effectiveness of these workshops and how you're able to justify the kinds of work that you're doing. So what we'd like to sort of get a feel for is how you're tracking your data, what kinds of information you're collecting from your faculty and from other people so you know, the effectiveness and the reach you're having across campus.

- Absolutely. That's always a concern. I will say that that is very much an open question that we reengage periodically. And, you know, you go to the POD conference, there's tons of sessions on how to do that. I don't think we've decided this is how we're gonna do it as a field. That's the way we, you know, we've met perfection. There's no point on improving on that. We're all trying to do the best that we can. Speaking as a statistician, these things are measurable, but a lot of the problems are, like, it could be a PhD thesis every year to really set up the kind of data collection and the models for data analysis that will give you the answers that you want. And so then how do you balance what's reasonable with what's possible in the abstract. And so for us, the things that we care about, we actually have come up with our assessment plan years ago that we presented at the USG conference as well, which your buddy Tom Posatari helped develop with Tris Utschig, our Director was Scholarly Teaching. It follows a progression. So the things that we're interested in documenting, it starts with sort of the number of offerings just to show what you were saying. Like what is the school getting for all the resources that they pour into us? What is the vitality of the center? We want to show that we're active, not to substitute quantity for quality, but just as an accountability, right? So that's the first level. The second one is who's coming? How many people are coming? Who's coming? From what colleges? What you know, et cetera, et cetera. So attendance, we're also collecting repeat attendance, so that's a measure of, okay, somebody saw something good and worthwhile and they came back for more. Right? Then we ask about sort of satisfaction in terms of their experience with CTL because a lot of the work that we do is sort of personable. And, so, we want to make sure that we're treating people in the way that they deserve to be treated and all those things, as well as the quality. Quality of the sessions, the PowerPoints, the expertise of the presenters, the handouts, the everything, right? And then we ask, what did you learn out of this? Ideally you would, you know, you would get more direct measures of learning. That's possible in some cases. So for instance, we teach a graduate course for graduate students on college, university teaching. We have assessments from that course that really give us a picture of what the students are learning from what are essentially workshops, you know, translated into a strong, along into a course, but either direct or indirect measures of learning. And then what we're interested in collecting as well is how will you use this knowledge? How do you plan? Either what's one thing that you plan to implement as a result of attending this workshop or working with us in whichever ways or what kind of plan you have. And sort of from the survey research, intent to apply is really as far as you can get with this kind of post-event service, right? We would like to collect a little more. So we do some follow ups, not as frequently as, you know, every time that we do a workshop, but periodically -'how did you actually apply those things' to get a sense of that. We also collect products that people do, like when we, from our course design institutes, you know, we have modules, we have syllabi, we have entire courses we developed. From our solo programs, we have articles that faculty end up writing and submitting and publishing and presenting. So, those are those sort of, you know, public available stay behind. We make an effort to follow up with people to see what happened after those programs. The other thing that's on a sort of a different axis that we want to track is the idea of community. Part of the work is a part of our intent. We want, that's our tagline, unofficial tagline is 'Creating a community of educators.' And so are we doing that? How are we doing that? To what extent are we doing that and what does that mean? Who is included in that community? Do we have the same impact with, you know, full-timers, faculty who teach part-time and different fields and do they feel equally included in the community, et cetera, et cetera. So we do ask specifically about those things as well.

- So, Michele, I just have to say I, that was really terrific and I love the way that you use all those different data points to try to triangulate your impact. I think it's really helpful, and I think it's an incredibly comprehensive plan you have, especially considering as a fellow, I'm a psychologist, but a fellow statistician. I understand the messiness of the data you get when you do these kinds of collection. You have to come at it from lots of different ways. So I appreciate your answer. Eddie, you have the next question?

- Yeah, this is our last question for you, Michele and I guess it's evolving in my own head as we've been a part of this conversation now for like 20 minutes or so. Yeah, I guess there's a bit of mission creep that many CTLs are struggling with right now because there are so many requests that come to us for various kinds of things on campus. Like, especially, I imagine some of the requests that you might get from the colleges might be a little bit far afield from maybe your core mission or core identity. And I guess that's the key question is how do you communicate to the constituents on your campus, whether they be senior leaders or deans as well as faculty, possibly graduate students and even students, what are some of the strategies that you use to communicate your mission and identity and I guess maybe in an ongoing recursive way, so that to remind people of exactly who you are and what your purpose is?

- Absolutely. That's a very important question, and it's a dynamic question because our identity, just for our center, has changed over the years, multiple times in our university. We've had six Presidents in the span of six years and five Provosts. And with each one of them reorgs have come. And, so, at one point the Distance Learning Center was a part of CTL, right? And now it's not. That means-

- Gotta say Michela, that is an astonishing turnover narrative. Like I was aware that there had been some churn and we shared a Provost President at one, you know, transitioned from my campus to your campus, but wow, six in six years.

- I'm counting the intern ones as well, right? With somebody making decisions during those times as well. And actually from the Southern Polytechnic, which got consolidated with us, they would count even one more, right? So, lots of upheaval. And so in that space, it's really important to put your message out, but also the message out, the message goes out in this space, which is the same space where every other unit is also trying to put their message out. There's a lot of noise in that field at a time where our university actually lost their communication system. Like we would post our events to the system and then a digest would go out to the faculty with all the opportunities from every unit that posted there daily, right? Instead of spamming everybody, every unit spamming everybody. We lost that digest. We've been without that the product was- And so, and then, and we've, you know, evaluating different other ones. It's, you know, there's people that are doing that. So, we had to make and sort of reinvent our communication strategy in the meantime, and this is what we've pieced together. Certainly our website is the space. We try to drive people to the website and really make sure that everything is always up to date, all the communications, whether it is events happening, whether it is job openings, whether it is funding opportunities especially. And then in due of sending things out to the system, we are actually sending them out to the colleges. Fortunately, we have aliases that we can take advantage of. So we always email all the deans, all the Chairs, the Associate Deans, Assistant Associate Deans, Assistant Associate Chairs. Those are the aliases that we use repeatedly as well as we email the Chair of the Faculty Senate to distribute to the senators and then they wrap it back to their departments. In this sort of interim period, in between systems, the Provost and the Presidents have started creating their own newsletters, updates, messages. And so the President always does more of a high level one monthly but the Provost is more tactical. And so we actually have the opportunity to communicate, to send the provost office items, right? And it might be funding, it might be any of those things, awards. And so that's... We're lucky with that because people opened the email from the Provost so that that has really come to our benefit. So, that's sort of the how, but in terms of what we're communicating and sort of who we are, we actually did a... We went through a process during the pandemic of figuring out who we are, who are we, What does it mean now to do faculty development in this pandemic era and post-pandemic era, you know, not doing it on campus, doing it remotely, then coming back to campus, then doing other things and especially the idea of the mission creep that you were talking about. For us it's a little different because for a few years before the pandemic CTL had, was constituted into multiple units. One was the Distance Learning Unit that's no longer, it's still vital, thriving just in a different part of the institution. But we also had Scholarly Teaching as a unit and then Faculty Success. Now scholarly teaching would do the things that centers do usually, just pedagogical training, learning sciences, assessment, technology, all of that.

- You had a website that I referenced quite often back when I was at Georgia, just with journals and what their focuses were. So, yeah, very familiar.

- Thank you, appreciate that. But the other side was faculty success, and that included professional development beyond teaching. And so, we didn't see that as mission creep. We wanted to do that in the sense that for, and we were lucky that we had both the capacity as a center to absorb that kind of work as well as the expertise in different people.

- I mean, your background, you are a Professor of Mathematics, correct?

- Absolutely. Yeah.

- Yeah. So that positions you well to engage in that new scope of work.

- And so, you know, the onboarding, the support for annual reviews, tenure and promotion, support for scholarship productivity, not to replace the Office of Research, but to compliment what they do. So, for instance, workshops on, I don't know how to establish your independence from your advisor, you know, when you're starting out, those kinds of things. How to respond to reviewer criticism and submission, that those kinds of ideas as well as work-life balance, community identity and wellbeing. Those were areas of programming. Mutual mentoring groups for cohorts, for instance, parents in academia to like gather them and help and support each other and you know, people who understand what they're going through with all the... So, all of that is happening at the teaching center, which our new tagline for that is, "Faculty success equals student success". There is a lot of emphasis on student success in the nationally, but certainly the University System of Georgia has really, really invested in that idea. But we're certainly doing that. But we're also pointing out that supporting the faculty ultimately is supporting the students. Because when faculty are fulfilled, when they know what's going on, they have all the information that they need, et cetera, then they're able to support the students in a way that's really much better. So we're happy to do both sides as we can.

- Well Michele, thank you so much for your time today. We really appreciate the insights into how you do the work that you do at Kennesaw State, so very grateful. Chris, last words.

- No, thanks a lot. I mean, your answers were incredibly comprehensive and really, really helpful. I really enjoyed hearing from you, so thanks Michele. Really appreciate it.

- Welcome, welcome. Thank you everybody.