The Faculty Shortcut: How Educators Upskill in Half the Time

The Hidden Bottleneck in Faculty Upskilling

Most faculty-development programmes demand months or even years. Yet, the real time sink is beyond content absorption. It includes application, integration, peer feedback, and iteration. Too often, faculty finish a course and then falter when deploying it in their classrooms because support and scaffolding are missing.

A revealing case study published in the Australasian Journal of Educational Technology explored a training course for educators around generative AI. The authors reported that over multiple iterations, participants’ submissions informed ongoing refinements in course content, and weekly discussion boards and assignments were adjusted in real time to optimise learning outcomes. This “live tuning” of faculty upskilling contrasts with static, one-and-done professional development.

Supposedly, a university delivered a 12-week AI fundamentals course to faculty, with coach-led labs and check-ins. After Week 4, coach observations revealed that many struggled with prompt engineering. The remainder of the syllabus was adapted mid-stream to emphasise that, which led to a doubling of lab success rates in Weeks 6–12.

This way, educator training must adapt dynamically, not be rigid.