Making of ACAS 13: Faculty Websites

College where each one of the faculty members has a website of her/his own is a rarity. Neither is it mandatory to be that way. Unless the need can be justified strongly, there is no rationale to argue in favour of this. I don't think the digital presence and footprints will grow so exponentially that each professional will need to have one personal website. But many professionals who take themselves seriously create permanent, impressionable presences on the world wide web as it improves their visibility and showcases their activities and achievements. My efforts at ACAS have been to impress upon each member of the faculty community that they are professionals who take themselves and their career development seriously. Hence the idea to make the faculty members find their early digital foothold with at least personal Googlesites. Since ACAS had established an ecosystem which promotes sustained faculty professional development with a suite of programmes addressing the promotion of their writings, reading, speaking, research, collaboration, organisational, publication skills, it was good idea to have a space where all these efforts and achievements of the faculty members could be stored accessibly. 

The Plan 

A website for each faculty member: this was the plan. If there was something out of which the idea sprang up, it was the flipped learning which we adopted. Though we dabbled with Moodle and it is an excellent space to be a repository of the materials developed and shared as part of the Flipped Learning mode, we could never really follow up successfully on the Moodle front. Efforts are still underway. Hence I felt parallelly the idea of faculty websites could be pushed forward as a space where students could access the materials offered by each teacher. We have an LMS, but I didn't want the materials developed by the faculty to be completely taken out of their ownership and be the stuff owned by the institution. Moreover, a personal website can offer much more than what an LMS carries. Hence, though pretty ambitious, I presented the idea, at the very start of the college and waited to see how things unfold. The message given to the faculty members clearly emphasised the professional takeaways of such an effort. 

The Implementation 

Obviously we made very slow progress and I don't think anyone will be surprised with that outcome early on. Even for me, though the idea was shared, uncertainty remained. As often, I would just share the thought loudly and see how it sinks in. I was sure that this item on the agenda is uncommon and demands slow and studied follow up. Though the deadline was given as March 2021, the academic year of the launch of the college, not all faculty members could make it in that year, except a couple of them. Even among the sites ready, not all were equally impressive though the effort was indeed to be appreciated. The templates and samples were made available and there has been consistent soft follow-up unlike the rigourous follow-up practiced regarding the Flipped Learning kind of practices. Since many were new to the idea, also young with not a lot of activities, presentations or publications to showcase, there was obvious hesitancy at the start. 

The Challenges

Unless the faculty members are professionally driven and ambitious, it is not easy to motivate the lot. But a young faculty community of a private young institution has been relatively easy to motivate as they are at the early stages of their careers and are keen to do well to move to the next level. This has helped them work on their personal websites and create at least a landing page to begin with. This was slowly expanded with more content, pages later, months later at times. 

This constituted one of the core reasons for not attempting to create one: the question of content. What will go into the website? I wasn't unaware of this dilemma. But I wanted the faculty to find ways of bolstering the content. In an event-packed Campus like ours, it wasn't hard to have minimal content for a faculty personal website, but still inexperience made some of our colleagues hesitate at the start.  This was partly because they were beginning to realise the knack of spreading their work-stories, the outcomes, plans, the presentations, the resources shared with students, the projects launched and the like on the web. The other part was, as stated earlier, lack of content. Gradually this showed marked improvement. By the time I made my exit from the institution in April 2024, all the regular faculty members of the college had a Google site of their own. 

Websites cost money and that's why we decided to go economical via free of cost Google sites. Despite the fact that these sites are not Google-searchable, we felt that we can start off in that mode and later have these sites upgraded it to proper sites with technical support from the Computer Science Department and potential funding from the institutional management body. Also, it was not advisable to rush the young workforce into something that ambitious as personal websites too early without light exposure to the idea. Let them  play and experiment with their work in progress Google sites. This helped surmount the early challenges to a great extent.  

One year into the effort, we began asking the Heads of the Departments and the Internal Quality Assurance Cell (IQAC) coordinator to make the move from Google sites to professional websites. The compliance ratio was less than total, but still out of the 5 Dept heads, 4 were ready with the Google-searchable personal websites. 

The Takeaways 

Certain efforts are taken not expecting exciting outcomes. Certain practices are launched without expecting immediate or total compliance in a jiffy. At times it may be awe-inspiring idea, and at times, a curiosity raising plan. But I always believe that, byte by byte, the members of the team could be taken to where we intend to lead them, provided we lead right. The one lesson they have learnt is that the work they do can be documented on a web of their own. The better the work, the better the content, the better the web. This undoubtedly encouraged many of the faculty members to help raise the quality of their work. There were comparisons among them and they felt the need to enlarge their presences through better inputs. 

One senior faculty member thanked me saying that when she goes out for invited sessions, it is easy to simply share their web link and the participants can not only get the download of the material she wanted to share with the participants of a session, but also a glimpse of her professional status too. Another faculty member who faced an interview to move on to a bigger institution could impress them with his professional presence though his personal website. It also helps them to reflect on the work they have left behind and act as a source of pride too in the long run. 

It needs no assertion that for the college it is a matter of much professional pride to state that all faculty members have personal websites of her own. In terms of continuous professional development, these websites can play a pivotal role and this was evident at many levels. 

The Way Forward 

The personal websites were primarily meant to accelerate the professional growth of the faculty members and to help them showcase their work digitally. We also wanted them and their resources to be accessed digitally, thus bringing them more hits and promising monetary benefits in the really long run. This will obviously necessitate a switch from Google sites to professional websites and we were sure that at one stage this leap will happen naturally. Regular updation of the content of the websites will be a herculean task to meet in the future as this is hard even for the institutional websites! 

Babu.P. K., Ph D.