Introduction
Particularly in administration, we are often slow to adopt new tools and methodologies, in no small part, we believe, due to the anarchical nature of the academy. We all have a range of activities vying for our intellectual and professional attention, and often our ability to evaluate and implement new tools and techniques is reserved first for our research and, perhaps, teaching. Considering innovation in the administrative activities of our work often takes a distant third place, and therefore tends to stagnate, even in the face of obviously superior models. For a variety of perhaps compelling reasons, we have clung to our increasingly antiquated models for storing, sharing, and collaborating on work in the business of the academy, sometimes despite the seemingly obvious benefits that moving to newer models of collaboration would afford.
As is so often the case, our College of Pharmacy found that necessity was the driver of adoption. In 2011 we found ourselves in the fifth year of a protracted curriculum revision process, and, despite yeoman’s work on the part of numerous collegiate committees and individual faculty members, we were continuing to struggle to a path of clarity and implementation. With accreditation demands looming and a broad, general consensus among our more than 100 faculty and our senior administration for the need for curriculum revision, we were struggling less with the “why” questions and more with the “how”, particularly among the administrators (of which the authors are two) charged with shepherding this process forward.
A number of common questions and concerns began emerging. First, it was clear that those who did not sit on the committee were struggling to make sense of the huge amounts of information that was being shared with them about the curriculum effort. While individual faculty members had proposed models and then even more detailed specific courses, the sheer amount of data that was being shared, along with the inconsistency of format among the various documents that were being developed by individual faculty or small faculty teams for proposed new courses, made it difficult for people to understand where the process was really headed, overall. Additionally, gathering feedback was an obvious challenge. Lunchtime meetings and large faculty assemblies provided an opportunity to provide updates and to hear concerns and suggestions from a few individual members, but these did not provide a sufficiently robust, interactive, democratic mechanism by which to engage in an ongoing discourse as the revision effort proceeded. People’s schedules are busy, and if they were unable to attend the meeting, they missed critical milestones in the process. Similarly, even when they did attend, the reality of a large faculty coming together to discuss weighty issues with plural challenges meant that not all voices could be heard in a full day retreat, let alone in a 90-minute meeting.
We diagnosed these challenges in two major ways. First, we had a cognitive load issue (van Merriënboer and Sweller, 2005). We needed a mechanism by which our faculty could have access to an up-to-date project plan that allowed them easily and relatively effortlessly to get a quick overview of the broad work that had been done, with answers in a readily digestible format to the most frequently asked questions, but also to have the ability to delve more deeply into specific areas of interest when they felt they understood the broad picture. Second, we had a faculty engagement challenge. We needed a mechanism by which faculty could participate at their leisure, provide their input just-in-time, and engage in an ongoing dialogue to feel confident that their concerns were being appropriately addressed. To use Vroom’s (1964) expectancy/valence model of motivation, we needed to create a mechanism where faculty felt expectancy that their participation would have an outcome, and value for the outcome that they expected -- in this case, the expectation that, if they chose to participate, they would be able to understand where things stood and contribute their thoughts for improvement and refinement, and a values belief that their recommendations would improve the overall direction for the new curriculum.
Methods
Step 1: Reducing Cognitive Load: Using Low Activation Energy, Cloud-Based Tools as an Organizer
Our first goal was to set about reducing cognitive load among our faculty so that the work that was done, as well as the work that remained to be done, was clear. To accomplish this goal, the senior leadership of the College, working in conjunction with the Curriculum Revision Steering Committee (CRSC), decided to create an online, interactive web site using a series of Google Docs. Google Docs is a fully online, collaborative suite of tools that allows for real-time, collective work on word processing activities, spreadsheets, presentations, and other types of files. For this project, we used primarily just the “doc” feature, which is analogous to Microsoft Word -- but created and edited online.
First, we created a simple table with four columns for each year of our proposed new curriculum which housed some very basic information about the current state of the proposed new curriculum as a whole (see Figure 1). What courses were being proposed for fall semester of the first year? How many hours were currently assigned to each course? How many total hours were we at for the entire semester? These were some of the pressing, high-level questions that our faculty expressed broad interest in knowing more about.
Figure 1: College of Pharmacy Curriculum Revision, Overall Framework
Figure 1 shows the constantly evolving overview page for the first semester of the proposed new curriculum. Each course title linked out to another Google Doc page, the Course Detail Page, with both an overview and details about that specific course (see Figure 2).
At the top of each e created a template of some of the most common questions that were emerging through ongoing discussions with faculty and developed a template designed to answer these questions, which
The top of each Course Detail Page included a section titled “Course Name at a glance”, which included a template outlining some of the major questions that were commonly asked by our faculty about each course (see Figure 2). Among these common questions were:
- Who are the faculty “owners” of the course? Who is making the proposal outlined in this page, and how can I contact them with questions or suggestions?
- What topics will be covered in the proposed course?
- How many hours are being recommended to cover each of the topics?
- What competency domains and scientific foundation topics (accreditation-based) are mapped to each proposed topic?
- What prerequisite knowledge (courses or topics) are needed for this course?
- What courses or topics does this course serve as a prerequisite for?
- What, if any, integrated content will be used in this course?
Additionally, the faculty owners of each course were able to provide narrative detail about the course in whatever format they chose, available at the bottom of the page, after the standardized “at a glance” portion of the page.
Figure 2: Google Doc, “Introduction to Pharmacotherapy at a glance” Course Detail Page
Step 2: Democratizing the Conversation: Using Online Tools to Engage Faculty
Our second major area of diagnosis for the course was the issue of faculty engagement: that is, creating a mechanism by which everyone could participate in an ongoing, relatively easy way. We have over 100 faculty in our College, so even in the best of circumstances, when we would host required, all day meetings, we got to hear only from a relatively small minority of our faculty.
We were able to use two cloud-based tools relatively effectively to “democratize” the conversation around the Curriculum Revision efforts. First, using the Google Docs site described in the section above, we were able to encourage faculty to visit the course pages at their leisure and to add comments to those pages that they did not “own”. The comments appeared in the right-rail of each Google Doc (see Figures 1 and 2), and created a robust, easy-to-use mechanism to facilitate ongoing dialogue about the courses that were being proposed and the various aspects of the revision process as they emerged.

Figure 3: ChimeIn Feed from the Faculty Retreat, sorted by word “integration”
We also used a cloud-based tool to add richness and additional points of feedback during our face-to-face meetings. During our summer 2011 faculty retreat, which was focused entirely on curriculum revision, we used a text-based, cloud-based audience response tool called ChimeIn to allow faculty to pose questions or make comments throughout the entire day of presentations and discussions, rather than just at specified moments. The ChimeIn tool then creates a Twitter-like feed of all of the responses, and also takes all of the responses and creates a word cloud of them (see Figure 3). By clicking on a word in the cloud, one can sort the feed to see just those responses that contained the selected word -- for example, “integrate” or “integration”.
Outcomes
As of this writing we have received more than 220 individual comments made by faculty on courses for which they are not considered the “owners”; many of these include weighty, complex ideas that have led to a rich debate about the nature of the suggested courses. We believe the richness and the sheer volume of this discussion suggests, at least preliminarily, that our approach has been working, at least to some degree, to engage the faculty in an ongoing dialogue about the curriculum revision process.
Similarly, during our faculty retreat, we received more than 350 individual “chimes” or instances of free text feedback from our faculty, which provided us a rich data source to mine both at the meeting and ongoing to get a sense of how the faculty were feeling about the curriculum revision process overall. We believe it is undeniable that this represents significantly more instances of feedback than we could have possibly hoped for without the aid of technology. The chairs of our Curriculum Revision Steering Committee have indicated that they have found the archived chimed data very helpful in guiding their understanding of the major concerns of the faculty, broadly speaking.
Conclusions
Using a cloud-based model to support our faculty in the curriculum revision process has proven efficacious in a number of key ways. First, we believe that it has allowed us to reduce cognitive load by allowing faculty to view the entire curricular plan online in a way where they can follow their paths of interest, ask questions in real-time, and, when appropriate, make changes to the online materials. It has also reduced administrative load; the need for an individual person to serve as the “point” person to collect individual MS Word documents by email and collate the responses is functionally gone in this model, as everyone is working on the same Google document in the cloud. We have also increased the opportunity for providing feedback, thereby, we believe, increasing engagement among our faculty. Rather than having to wait for face-to-face meetings that occur monthly or even semesterly, faculty can go online and join in the discussion at their leisure, taking as much or as little time as they wish to add their thoughts, respond to their colleagues, or make changes to the content for which they are owners.
Finally, while we have no empirical evidence for this, our qualitative assessment is that this approach has promoted a sense of goodwill among the faculty. Tensions can run high during these processes, and we have found that the online discussion has created something of a pressure valve to allow faculty to articulate their concerns in an offline mode. Face-to-face meetings are richer and seem to be starting from a more progressive stance than they were prior to our use of these tools.
References
Michael D. Cohen, James G. March and Johan P. Olsen (1972). “A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice. Administrative Science Quarterly , 17(1). pp. 1-25
van Merriënboer, Jeroen J.G., and Sweller, John (2005). “Cognitive load theory and complex learning: Recent developments and future directions.” Educational Psychology Review, 17(2). pp. 147-177.
Vroom , V. H. (1964). Work and motivation. New York: Wiley.