Mission

The Center for Faculty Development provides new and experienced faculty a space to learn about research-based teaching strategies and to share their insights and experiences with a community of colleagues.

GOALS

1. Promote the professional growth of faculty through effective and innovative programs.
2. Develop and identify materials and resources that support the faculty with their effective teaching practices.
3. Conduct both formal and informal research to determine the professional development needs of faculty.
4. Collaborate with the Human Resource Department and Quality Enhancement Cells to develop policies and strategies that promote excellence in teaching and learning practices.

The Center for Faculty Development (CFD) at the Karakoram International University is established to provide a platform where novice and experienced faculty can get help and support with their teaching-related responsibilities. Regardless of individuals’ mastery in their own specialization, there is still a need for the faculty to engage in activities, discussions, and deliberations that will help them to understand the nuts and bolts of the best teaching practices at the university level. Today’s students are more enlightened, due to their access to modern technologies and a variety of social media. They might have prior and better understanding about the topics the instructors are teaching and they might know what the best teaching practices are. Under these circumstances, it is essential for the faculty to better prepare themselves to harness students’ potential and prepare them to enter a complex, diverse, global workforce and to secure the trust of students on their capabilities and the level of their knowledge.

Structure of the programs

Instead of relying on traditional approaches to faculty development, the CFD strives to offer programs that invite faculty members’ interaction and deliberation as the key intellectual activities-in other words, we hope to create a more active and reflective teaching and learning culture on campus that will influence the quality of teaching and learning in the classrooms. The aim is to motivate the instructors to practice the same processes of interaction and deliberation learned from the CFD, while teaching different subjects at different levels. Besides offering regular workshops with the involvement of instructors who possess relevant expertise, the CFD arranges online workshops and seminars. The duration of each session will be two and half hours, (with a 30 minute break), in which two instructors conduct sessions in an interactive manner. Also, one-on-one consultations are available for individual faculty members in which they can get guidance on their teaching practices from CFD staff.
Although the programs are designed to meet the needs of either newly appointed or experienced faculty, the uniqueness of the center is that it offers programs to students as well. An example of such a program is one that provides information to students with their reading related challenges; further details are available on the website under students’ sessions.

Thematic Areas

Faculty development has been reorganized as a cornerstone for bringing excellence to the quality of teaching at the higher education level. This recognition has led to the development of a myriad of research in which various dimensions of teaching and learning have been investigated. Therefore, the thematic areas selected for faculty development are based on empirical evidence conducted locally and globally, including:

1. Developing course outlines
2. Teaching approaches and methodologies at the university level
3. Reading materials and reading strategies at the university level
4. Developing understanding about online instructional resources
5. Designing class assignments
6. Assessment/Rubrics
7. Students’ sessions

In the resource section (on the left) several links, tutorials, research papers, journal articles, and videos retrieved from multiple sources, have been provided to further help the instructors with the above mentioned topics.