The Incentivising Wad

Returning again to the thorny issue of incentivising faculty to treat the online teaching & learning channel as personally rewarding & fulfilling. I was lying awake, after getting back from a week in Houston, remembering that the (global) partner institutions had mentioned the difficulty they have with faculty engaging with the instructional design process. Our place suffers from an apathy on the part of faculty to engage in a time consuming process that, in the end, is not financially rewarding for them. What with all the other draws on time, having to engage as SME in a protracted and interative design process creating online material for Exec Ed clients is not top of the list of priorities. At our place, time spent in online work is neither explicitly recognised nor rewarded.

It occured to me there were two problems and several opportunities facing the uptake of networked learning across the school. Firstly the problem of engaging our clients in consuming our online product (by product I mean the more just-in-time stuff like recorded & live Breeze sessions); and secondly, the problem of engaging our faculty to create, maintain and facilitate online product for that client - be that on a group or individual basis. Establishing or building motivation from the client is easier to understand if the online proposition includes direct access to a faculty member - either on a one-to-one coaching basis or group seminar basis. However, given the systemic problem of incentivisation in our place, the demand for such online product cannot be met. If traffic in one direction is a given (and bear in mind this is only a hypothesis), how do we drive faculty to the client in the online world?


What if we could devise some sort of auction system, that guaranteed financial or teaching credit reward to the faculty members meeting the online product need of clients? At this stage, not being explicit as to exactly what the product is, it is difficult to generalise as to how the such a system would work. But the amount of reward could be based on time spent on live seminar/meeting with a group, or time spent on a one-to-one session with a client. The ideal system would automatically capture time spent, and, based on some sort of calculation or weighting, divvy the reward accordingly.

When we are looking for differentiation in a crowded market (not just for B-school offerings but web2.0 services in general), and given the nature and limitations of our place, and given also that the issue of royalites has been raised, such a system, carefully investigated and designed, might offer a solution.