Faculty views, practices, and priorities for training and professional development: a case study in two Greek peripheral Universities

Abstract

This article presents the main results of a large-scale anonymous survey at two Greek Universities, namely the Democritus University of Thrace and the University of Patras, funded by European Union (National Strategic Reference Framework), that aims to identify the Greek in-service faculty educational needs. The survey instrument was developed based on two focus groups with faculty members of the participating Universities and literature review. The questionnaire consisted of 34 closed- and open- ended items and was fully completed from a total of 260full-time faculty members. The study explored the perceptions of faculty teaching role, current teaching practices, evaluation and professional development and priorities in training preferences for several faculty development topics. Our findings show that faculty members consider teaching as a very important dimension of their role, they use a variety of educational techniques, but they mainly base their teaching in lecture. They declare that educational background of their students and the level of communication with them constitute problems to their teaching practice, along with issues related to infrastructure. As for the areas for a possible training, they prefer issues related to the use of new technologies and distance education, the development of critical thinking of their students, and participatory and active teaching techniques.