When Scott L. Phillips took over as director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, he encountered a common challenge: Faculty members were too busy to attend the workshops he ran.
He would hold events in his office, and only three or four people would show up. “We’d sit and talk about teaching techniques,” he says.
The low turnout discouraged Phillips, who worried he might lose the job he started in 2015 if he did not bring up the numbers. So, inspired by the “gamification” trend in undergraduate education, he decided to turn professional development into a game, complete with points, stickers, and a leaderboard. Attend a workshop, and you’d get 10,000 points and a badge. Accumulate 100,000, and you’d earn a certificate.
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It was a risky move — what if faculty members found it frivolous? But the gaming gambit worked. In just three years, faculty attendance at the center’s workshops has nearly quadrupled — from 98 in the first semester of 2015 to almost 400 this past spring. Average attendance has climbed from seven to 16, while the number of workshops offered has more than tripled.
Lisa S. Pair, a nurse-practitioner instructor who has amassed 325,000 points, says she’s motivated less by the points than by a desire to improve her teaching. Still, she loves the leaderboard, and checks it regularly to see if she’s beating a friend in the physician-assistant program, Neena A. Xavier.
“We go for the learning, but the games make it fun,” she says.
Xavier (who, for the record, is leading by more than 200,000 points), started attending workshops last year, when she left her clinical practice to become a full-time faculty member. Like Pair, a fellow former clinician, she was looking for lessons on how to be an effective teacher. The badges were a bonus, offering “documentation of the efforts you’ve put in.”
“When you’re introducing new pedagogies, you can say, I’ve been certified in it,” she says. “It can help with buy-in.”
Birmingham is one of a small, but growing, number of campuses that are using incentives to draw faculty members to professional-development programs. Most offer symbolic prizes — badges and certificates that faculty members can display on LinkedIn or include in promotion-and-tenure materials — but a few, including Indiana University at South Bend, offer financial prizes, too. Last spring semester, its “Learn and Earn” program gave almost $5,000 to 41 adjunct faculty members, at a rate of $13 per hour of participation, according to Gwendolyn W. Mettetal, who designed the program.
Of course, points, badges, and other incentives work only if faculty members see the value in them — and not all do. In surveys conducted by the State University of New York system, which offers more than 100 badges, some faculty members said such credentials provided concrete proof of their growth and fed their competitive drive; others found them just plain “silly.” As one respondent put it: “I stopped earning badges when I left Girl Scouts. What’s the point of these?”
G. Christopher Clark, assistant director of the Kaneb Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Notre Dame, says badges appeal mostly to graduate students, who are seeking to showcase their skills. Tenure-track professors “don’t have a whole lot of motivation to do this, because they don’t get rewarded for it, at least not here.”
Mettetal, who recently retired, sees a “generational gap” in how badges are viewed on college campuses. “The junior faculty get it, but the senior faculty aren’t really sure what they are, and neither are the administrators,” she says.
Last year, Texas Wesleyan University abandoned a four-year experiment in badges after the effort failed to increase faculty participation in professional development. Lisa Hammonds, who helped design the college’s system and recently left for another Texas institution, says the idea “just fell flat.”
“Faculty thought it was frivolous,” she says.
Cassandra Volpe Horii, president of the Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education, sees great promise in “gamified” approaches like Birmingham’s, saying they can promote “a sense of self-direction and agency” among faculty members. Still, she says, “institutional culture and context is very important to consider.”
She suggests that programs consult with their faculty advisory groups when designing or adopting an incentives program. “What motivates faculty might vary across institution,” she says.
But at Birmingham, at least, the approach appears to be working. More than 150 faculty members have earned a teaching certificate since 2015, and another 850 are at least halfway there.
Even more important, the program seems to be improving teaching at the university. In the latest round of teacher evaluations, faculty members who attended between five and nine workshops the prior year scored slightly higher (one-tenth of a point, on a scale of 1 to 5) on the question of “Overall, I rate this instructor an excellent teacher” than those who attended fewer workshops, or none at all. Those who attended 10 or more workshops scored two-tenths of a point higher.
“This is more than just stickers and badges,” Phillips says. “They’re actually becoming better teachers. And that’s really our ultimate goal.”
