Professional Development

About Professional Development at BC

Professional Development at Bakersfield College is managed by the Academic Technology and Professional Development Department, with input and guidance from the Professional Development Committee.

Professional Development encompases functional, job specific, wellness-oriented, and other general learning opportunities for all employee groups.

Ongoing Workshops, including FLEX week:

Professional Development workshops are offered year-round. However, the week before the fall term and the week before the spring term start are designated as “FLEX Week”. During these weeks, much larger numbers of workshops are offered. The FLEX week schedule is viewable as it is developed under the “Upcoming Workshops” link below.

New Faculty Seminar

New full time faculty participate in our year-long orientation, called New Faculty Seminar (NFS). This seminar introduces faculty to campus policy and operations, as well as important functional aspects of being a faculty member at Bakersfield College. In addition to the non-instructional aspects of faculty work, this seminar spends a significant amount of time addressing pedagogy, teaching strategy, and teaching tools for both online and in-person instruction. The NFS is offered on a monthly basis on Friday mornings throughout the academic year.

Adjunct Faculty Orientation

Similar to the New Faculty Seminar, the Adjunct Faculty Orientation (AFO) is a seminar that covers both instructional and non-instructional aspects of faculty work. The AFO differs in that it is offered twice a year in the evening during FLEX Week, and focuses on some issues and functions specific to Adjunct Faculty needs.

Person Up

To learn more about the Person Up fellowship, check out this description of a conference presentation Bill Moseley, PhD, and Alex Rockey, PhD, gave at the Online Teaching Conference in 2021.

In the Spring of 2021, we launched the “Person Up” fellowship program. This program provided faculty the opportunity to work one-on-one with instructional designers to create high quality, show piece courses for high-demand courses. After the course shell was created, faculty fellows would serve as the lead for the course to help their colleagues best adapt the shell to their own unique teaching styles while still ensuring equity and inclusivity.

This fellowship program provides an example of a way to leverage limited instructional design staff on campus while empowering faculty in the design of highly-localized and equitable learning experiences for students. In this session, we will first provide an overview of this highly-localized and scalable instructional design model. We will then provide eight foundational principles of how these courses embodied “equity and inclusion by design” (Presidents Forum, 2020).

First, in the overview of the highly-localized and scalable instructional design model, we will provide a snapshot of how we leveraged limited instructional designers on campus while empowering faculty ownership over the creation of highquality showpiece courses. To prompt audience participants to imagine how to leverage existing expertise on their campus, we will lead participants through a guided practice to identify stakeholders and possible collaborators.

Second, we will present eight foundational principles of equitable and inclusive course design. These eight foundational principles meant that courses were: modular, mobile-friendly, visually-appealing, humanized, equityminded, mostly OER, badged, and data-based. To prompt audience participants to envision how they can design courses drawing from these principles, we will lead a guided discussion on how these principles can be integrated across disciplines. These principles allowed us to empower faculty in the creation of equitable and inclusive online course design.

This session will provide faculty and administrators insight into how we can leverage limited instructional design expertise on campus to empower faculty in the creation of equitable and inclusive online courses. By both providing an overview of the entire instructional design process and how we worked to empower faculty, we provide a framework in which faculty and administrators can identify ways in which they can create online courses that serve all students on our campuses.