“Teaching, research, and service” used to be a convenient shorthand to explain faculty work to outsiders. But in contemporary academic life, a more accurate summary would be: “Besides teaching, research, and service, I spend copious amounts of time on training protocols to keep the university and its stakeholders safe from liability.”
Campus administrators seem fixated on protecting the institution from all manner of risks, real and imagined. A major consequence of all that wariness: Faculty (and staff) training requirements have multiplied like mushrooms after a spring shower. Like a lot of faculty members, we are experiencing deep training fatigue as our work is subject to more and more bureaucracy. A case in point: On a single day recently, one of us had to sit through two training sessions: one on using Facebook for work purposes and another on managing affiliation agreements.
Does that fatigue mean we oppose all such training requirements? Of course not.
Indeed, the value and necessity of appropriate faculty training were proven in 2020, during higher ed’s emergency pivot to online teaching. One of the painful lessons of the pandemic was how unprepared most faculty members were for the shift. Professors who knew how to use their campus learning-management system (LMS) made the transition far more easily than those who had always minimized their interactions with Canvas, D2L, Blackboard, and the like. For the latter group, becoming an instant online educator in 2020 was nothing short of harrowing.
So yes, some faculty training can be a very good thing. But both the volume of training obligations and the time required to keep up (and stay in the good graces of institutional overlords) appear to be ballooning. And the rationale for some of that training? It’s not nearly as compelling as needing to know how to use the campus LMS during a pandemic.
Routinely now, even during breaks and summers, we are showered with links to the latest training — or retraining — programs. Only some are things we actually need to know to do our jobs well. And too often, retraining feels reminiscent of what Bill Murray’s character experienced in Groundhog Day.
What follows is a look at the good, the bad, and the ugly of it all, and some ideas on how institutions can emphasize the useful training and winnow out the pointless.
LMS and other tech training. This falls firmly in the useful category. The degree to which faculty members must use the LMS varies from campus to campus. But every instructor needs to understand the basics: things like how to create digital objects, upload documents, and organize a course shell. That said, good tech tools are constantly in revision to improve their quality, which means that faculty retraining is also a constant (“Please watch these convenient tutorial videos to learn about new changes …”). This training obligation becomes even more discouraging when the administration elects to convert to some “new and improved” system. One of us never really learned the previous course-management system — except how to post course syllabi — and so was spared the Sturm und Drang felt by campus peers who had to redo all of their course materials to be compatible with a new LMS.
Anti-harassment training. We both went to graduate school in an era when romantic liaisons commonly unfolded between professors and students, with limited attention to the ethical or personal consequences. Thankfully, those days are gone. Institutions now roll out training protocols that discourage power abuses and romantic entanglements between professors and students, or between supervisors and employees. Such training makes sense, but again, it’s the repeat training that feels excessive. Is it really necessary to endure a digital retraining on this topic every two or three years (unless of course you’ve been the focus of complaints)?
Institutional review-board rules. For scholars who do research involving human and animal subjects, training is essential to ensure their protection. But over time — perhaps driven by court cases and by fretful lawyers looking to head off more lawsuits — the IRB process has come to seem unnecessarily complicated, even under the best circumstances. Under the worst circumstances, an IRB committee may go well beyond the purview of protecting people and animals to weighing in on your study design, research protocols, or even theory and methods. Researchers end up pressured to adopt applications that discourage creativity, disrupt novel findings, and foster obsessive-compulsive levels of attention to insignificant details.
Assessment training. Some professors fondly remember the days when administrative oversight of teaching was limited to setting your teaching schedule and making sure you submitted grades on time. Today faculty members are overwhelmed by teaching innovations that require training: assessment, active learning, high-impact practices, student engagement, inclusivity, ungrading, generative AI. Should we improve critical thinking or the caliber of student engagement? Should we enhance workplace skills or professional communications? Once those institutional decisions are formulated, you may need to redesign your tests and assignments to meet the obligations of “quality-enhancement plans” for “continuous improvement” (i.e., one more damn hoop to jump through). Whatever the mission, more training may be needed to ensure everyone is “on the same page.”
Student-advising training. Agreeing to advise a student group potentially ushers in yet another set of training obligations — on details such as how to manage budget rules for student organizations, reserve campus space for meetings, oversee the group’s domestic or international travel, and/or negotiate intragroup conflicts. If any of those processes change, retraining is usually required. The upshot: Be aware that taking on this type of service may be time-consuming well beyond the simple task of advising the group.
And would you believe, golf-cart training? One of us had to take job candidates on a campus tour but first had to endure a digital protocol on how to drive a golf cart. The tip on not driving more than 30 mph wasn’t all that useful since most golf carts don’t have speedometers.
7 Tips for Less But Better Training
Having to endure so many of these “opportunities” has made faculty and staff members acutely aware of what works and what doesn’t. Among the common-sense fixes we would suggest for campus administrators:
- Before you impose yet another training requirement, justify why it is essential. Many of these programs materialize with little to no context (“It’s time once again for Avoiding Workplace Harassment 101”). Provide a solid rationale for why this activity needs to take place and identify the risks entailed in not doing it.
- Coordinate and pace training requests in relation to the rhythms of the semester. If you’re serious about encouraging faculty participation, don’t send out training invitations in the week or two before classes start, or just as winter or summer break begins.
- Simplify the training. Academics are busy people with enough complicated verbiage to read (and write). Send us training materials that convey important points in clear summaries or infographics. Tell us about the things that pose the greatest risk to our institution. For example, a graphic could summarize the key ethical principles in protecting research participants. We don’t need dense narratives with examples that may or may not pertain to faculty work. Commercial training products — rolled out by campus risk managers without local nuance — tend to focus on worst-case scenarios that are low probability in higher education. Similarly, embedding multiple quizzes in online training gets tedious and only encourages users to guess or game the system.
- Allow people to test out. If we can pass the pretest, we should be exempt from having to endure online lectures about topics we already know. And if we took and passed the training, and have a history of abiding by its principles, we should be exempt from retraining.
- Offer incentives for keeping up with copious training obligations. Perhaps reward those diligent folks with reduced parking fees or enter their names into a lottery for season tickets. It’s hard on morale when no negative consequences exist for those who don’t keep up with training obligations, who “wing it,” or who procrastinate until HR comes to call.
- Reframe the training so it doesn’t focus only on the negative. Some institutions offer new hires a crash course on academic ethics as a part of faculty orientation. The emphasis tends to be on avoiding the bad stuff (too close relationships with students — “be friendly, not friends”). But not enough time is spent talking about the positive outcomes of ethical practice (for instance, how quality mentoring relationships can lead to future career or graduate-school opportunities).
- We don’t need gold stars. Save yourself some time and eliminate all those “Certificates of Completed Training.” Such faux plaudits are vaguely insulting to those obligated to do the training anyway.
