You may have noticed recent changes to the faculty profile pages at Adelphi University.
You may have noticed recent changes to the faculty profile pages at Adelphi University. As co-chairs of the newly formed Faculty Senate Committee on Scholarship, we spearheaded this initiative and guided this effort to the final version you see today. Our committee first recognized the need for new faculty profiles after we surveyed faculty members to identify ways that we could work toward supporting and promoting research and scholarship at Adelphi. Several of the responses focused on the need to improve and update the faculty profiles. The former system had several flaws, most notably the visual presentation of information and the time-consuming nature of updating. Faculty indicated a desire to have more control over the presentation and formatting of their scholarship. It was the thought of both our committee and the broader faculty that improved faculty profile pages would better highlight research and scholarly activities, thereby potentially leading to more collaboration among colleagues both within and outside the university. We also believed that these changes could better attract potential graduate students to our university by making it easier for them to find faculty members with similar interests.
We discussed, as a committee, how to make this wide-scale change. This led to the first of several meetings between our committee, most notably, Director of the Center for Health Innovation, Dr. Elizabeth Cohn, and Adelphi Information Technology (IT), including Jack Chen, Carrie Shing, Scott Finkelstein and Erica Klein-Meisenhelter. Several rounds of meetings and conversations later, both with IT and with other groups including University Libraries and Marketing and Creative Services, we developed a mock profile faculty page. We then presented this mock profile page to both the Adelphi University Faculty Senate, as well as the faculty at large, to solicit feedback. Following several rounds of revisions by IT and with input from our committee, we shared a final draft with the Adelphi administration, including Deputy Provost Audrey Blumberg, and again with the Faculty Senate.
After receiving approval from the administration, we worked alongside IT to complete the faculty profile pages and set a launch date. On October 5, 2016, we displayed the new faculty profile pages on the Adelphi University website. The Faculty Center for Professional Excellence organized several workshops (“Profiles & Parfaits”) to teach faculty how best to utilize the features of the new profiles. Many faculty took advantage of these workshops, and offered suggestions about how to further improve the profiles.
This process would not have been possible without input from all the various individuals and committees mentioned above. The success of the new faculty profiles highlights the importance of committees and organizations on campus working together to support change efforts across the University. We want to thank everyone for all of their help throughout this process, and hope that the faculty continue to reap the benefits of these new-and-improved faculty profiles.
This article is from the Fall 2016 edition of the FCPE Newsletter.