Medaille CollegeBusiness Department
Medaille College
Douglas Andersonother pages
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departmental goals and College-plan
This annual self-evaluation is being submitted in the context of my portfolio, which may help to answer questions or clarify concerns.
Teaching - nine sections of six different courses
Scholarship - video production
Service - committees and task forces
Teaching - effective teaching
Scholarship - developing new skills
Service - active service
Teaching - transition to undergraduate courses
Scholarship - sabbatical preparations
Service - faculty professional portfolios
Teaching - new courses and course webs
Scholarship - sabbatical projects
Service - internationalizing the campus
My career arc is beginning to end. Looking back, I measure my career in decades, not years. My early goal was to write novels that would be published by a major New York publisher. It turned out that one such publication was enough. I am happy to have done that, but I don't need to do it again.
Another early goal was to get a graduate degree and tenure, which I accomplished by the early 1990's. As I turned my energies to teaching, I became involved in all of the College's major planning initiatives, especially the Title III grant.
Next, I became fascinated by what was happening online. Starting that early -- I sent my first email in 1988 and made my first web page in 1995 -- and having the scholar's luxury of time to keep up, I have a large body of knowledge that I have tried to lead my students toward. I have extensive experience teaching in a paperless classroom.
Health permitting, I intend to teach at least another dozen
years. Thus, I have time for substantial development.
Teaching
Stay close to the cutting edge. Continue being the first faculty
member to implement and experiment with new teaching tools.
Scholarship
Make more interesting, useful things using the latest tools.
Service
Contribute to the growth of the College.
Promotion
The handbook recommends application for promotion after a periodic professional review. My initial professional review will occur in Spring 2008, so I'll wait until Fall 2008, after I return from leave, to update my portfolio and submit it to the Promotion and Tenure Committee for promotion to full professor.
The Business Department doesn't have an academic plan in terms of a document I can refer to. My professional efforts are supported by the department faculty in the sense that they think what I teach should be part of our curriculum. However, against our better judgment as faculty, we have been directed to downsize the business curriculum in terms of both number of courses and number of credit hours. The knowledge and skills that I have to contribute have been largely cut out (along with those of other faculty, too), and thus I don't believe that they are congruent with the direction of the business program and department. Some of the knowledge and skills are in the curricula of other departments, but it remains to be seen whether I will be allowed to teach them or which department's academic plan I will have to fit next.
The revised Business core is firmly rooted in the past and will exacerbate the disconnect that I note below under Cultural Literacy.
The strategic plan directs the College's path to becoming a regional residential liberal-arts college subsidized by a satellite adult degree-completion and graduate credentialing program run on the for-profit model. As such, the College is well-positioned for the future.
It is my job to contribute to doing academically what our athletic department has done with women's basketball and men's soccer -- put the College on the national map. While athletes have a transparent, zero-sum competitive structure, a college's academic achievement is harder to measure. Our outcomes assessment effort is complex and hard to communicate succinctly to non-academics. It is difficult to get faculty to expose themselves professionally. Where the athletic teams have the season's final standings as a summative measure, the academics have ambiguous formative processes, and the College as a whole has a dozen competencies in the strategic plan.
To four of them, I make a special contribution because I am so focused on the future.
Critical Thinking: intellectual discernment and an active faculty of judgment.
I make students aware of their mental models of the world and I
encourage accurate models based on empirical data, even though that almost
always means abandoning old models that have in the past served the student (and
the faculty) well.
Communication: the ability to write effectively and
speak articulately.
I emphasize the opportunity provided by networked media to
expand "writing" from words only to include images, sounds, non-linearity, and
interactivity. I sit with every student and look at a video of an oral
presentation he or she made to the class.
Technological Aptitude: knowledge of the current,
flexibility in preparation for the future.
Every student leaves each of my courses more computer literate than he or she came in. While I recognize the past of Word and Powerpoint, I encourage the students to focus on the future where they, not I, not the rest of the antediluvian faculty, will be living and working. Their future will have very little paper, and Powerpoint already creaks like Henry Ford's Model T.
Cultural Literacy: grounding in the traditions of human intellectual and artistic achievement.
I encourage students to bring into school what they have learned online outside of school. For many of them, that is a revelation because of the vast and growing disconnect between formal education and the real world. That cultural divide is at least as great now as in the 1960's when we young adults didn't trust anyone over 30. We have moved from an industrial society to an information society where the factory model of education is an insidious institutional constraint. While individual teachers are advancing their cultural literacy, the education system as a whole doesn't "get it".
I tell the students that the changes brought by the Internet will be as far-reaching and profound as the Reformation and Enlightenment driven by the printing press. I provide the mental models for students to understand the changes (see Critical Thinking above). I encourage them to embrace that future and to prepare themselves to be part of that conversation. And I encourage them to not let the school system do to their children what it is doing to them -- restrain change.
As the students develop these competencies, I feel as though I make a contribution that needs to be made and, except for critical thinking, is not made as well elsewhere by the faculty.
Internationalizing the campus
The current presidential search lists internationalizing the campus among the challenges and opportunities. I am positioning myself on the academic dean's College-wide committee in 2007 and in the Netherlands in 2008 so that I can be a major contributor to this effort.
modified: January 2007
by Douglas Anderson
http://toLearn.net/portfolio/selfeval/2006/index.html