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Friday, April 12, 2013
Learning Objective 1: identify how a culture of faculty scholarship was successfully established at a small, private University through a workload adjustment for full-time faculty.
Learning Objective 2: describe how a faculty workload adjustment facilitated nursing faculty-student research collaboration in a baccalaureate nursing education program.
In 2010 Mount Mercy College began the transition to University status which brought renewed attention to scholarship with the launching of four graduate programs, among them an MSN program. It was recognized by faculty and administration, that to stimulate a cultural shift in which the role of scholarship would be emphasized college-wide, both in the undergraduate and graduate programs, a work-load adjustment would need to be implemented. University Administration determined that tenured and tenure-track faculty wishing to participate in research would be placed on a 3-credit workload deduction to enable them to spend time conducting research. So instead of teaching 24 credits per academic year, these faculty could teach 21 credits and use release time for scholarly research. Because faculty teaching in the Department of Nuring recognized that their workload was calculated differently (primarily due to clinical instruction not being counted as direct teaching hours), they began the process of quantifying the faculty workload in a way that would be comparable to 24 credits per year. This poster outlines the process taken and the unique differences in nursing workload that had previously not been quantified. Additionaly, the poster summarizes the scholarship production that has resulted from the opportunity for nursing faculty to have a 3 credit workload deduction, and the opportunities it has provided for students to collaborate with nursing faculty in doing research.