Understanding faculty development : a qualitative typology of services and purposes

Abstract

The concept of faculty development, or teaching-learning centers, has been gaining importance around the world since late 1950s in the context of higher education. Their services and offerings have been changing in theory and implementation in time due to the changing needs and demands in higher education. Despite the fact that teaching and learning center initiatives and proposed models of faculty development have been researched for many years, the concept of faculty development is relatively new within the context of Turkey, and its practice is limited. However, there is a lot to learn from the experiences of the universities which have been implementing such programs for years. The purpose of this study is to explore the services offered by faculty development centers through the cross-case analysis of their web sites by using Lee’s (2010) categorization of services and Robertson’s classifications of faculty development missions as lenses. The researcher used cross-case analysis to explore the web sites of teaching-learning centers of the top twenty-eight universities according to the US World News and Rankings in 2016 so as to determine the main services, sub-services, duration, target audiences as well as the purposes of main services. The results yielded to the development of the typological classification of the purposes. Findings provide insights to the practices of the best universities and therefore enable a model for future developers in Turkey.