Provost Office Announces Faculty Incentives for Intersession 2021

30 Sep 2020 by Paul Schacht, CDL Director

Megaphone, by Flickr user Jeff Ferzoco, CC BY-NC 2.0

The Office of the Provost is excited to offer a new round of faculty incentives for Intersession 2021.

Before planning to take advantage of one of these incentives, please be sure to check with your department chair or dean about any courses you intend to teach. Remember that department chairs and deans, not individual faculty, submit courses for inclusion in the intersession schedule.

Intersession 2021 will run for four weeks (January 4-29) rather than the usual three.

Faculty base compensation for Intersession 2021 is $1000 per credit hour, assuming that the course enrolls at least eight students. Below eight students, a faculty member may agree to accept a prorated salary; otherwise, the course will be canceled.

Faculty may teach no more than two Intersession 2021 course sections, for a maximum of eight credit hours.

Faculty who agree to teach high-enrollment sections (with a cap of 40 or more students) will earn double the base salary if the course enrolls 31 or more students. Faculty may not teach multiple sections of the same course.

Chairs have the discretion to limit offerings to ensure courses offered enroll sufficiently to run. Departments should not offer a second section of a given course unless the first one fills.

1. Section enrollment incentive

If you teach a three- or four-credit course in Intersession 2021 that has twelve or more students enrolled after the add-drop period, you’ll receive $500 compensation in addition to the standard compensation of $1000 per credit hour. You can earn this incentive for a maximum of two courses in Intersession 2021.

2. Course improvement or antiracism incentive

Choose one of the following:

A. Course improvement incentive

For a three- or four-credit course that you teach in Intersession 2021, you can earn $500 compensation in addition to the base compensation of $1000 per credit hour for adopting certain best practices for online instruction that you haven’t previously implemented. Below is a short list of examples. It’s not exhaustive; you may be able to earn the incentive for implementing practices other than these. To earn this incentive, you must (1) meet with an instructional designer in CIT to agree upon appropriate best practices to implement and (2) Complete the required items in CIT’s Course Readiness Checklist and implement the practices in your Canvas course(s) by December 14, 2020. Payment of this incentive is contingent on CIT acknowledgment that the agreed-upon practices were successfully implemented by the deadline.

Representative examples of best-practice improvements:

• Modifying assignments and assessments for the online environment, including creating rubrics to evaluate student work.
• Adding prerequisites and requirements to modules that help track student progress through the course.
• Adding introduction and conclusion pages to “bookend” each module in a course.
• Applying Universal Design Principles to a course in order to provide multiple means of engagement, representation, and expression.

B. Antiracism incentive

For a three- or four-credit course that you teach in Intersession 2021, you can earn $500 compensation in addition to the base compensation of $1000 per credit hour for any of the following:

1. Teaching a course that deals centrally with issues of race and racial justice in a way that advances Geneseo’s 2020-21 initiative of Becoming an Antiracist College. (If you fully develop such a course in Canvas for Intersession 2021 and enrollment is insufficient for the course to run, you can still earn the incentive if you share the course in Geneseo Canvas Commons. In that case, original content must be Creative Commons-licensed, so that other Geneseo faculty may make use of it in their own courses. If the course enrolls sufficiently and you teach it, neither sharing nor CC-licensing is required. Recipients of this incentive must commit to publishing, no later than March 1, 2021 a post on this blog explaining how the course advanced the college’s initiative.)
2. Including one or more modules, in a course that does not deal centrally with issues of race and racial justice, engaging these issues in a way that is related to the course topic and advances Geneseo’s 2020-21 Becoming an Antiracist College initiative. (The module[s] must be shared in Geneseo Canvas Commons, and original content must be Creative Commons-licensed, so that other Geneseo faculty may incorporate the module[s] into their own courses.)
3. Incorporating content (readings, lectures and other explanatory content, activities, etc.), in a course that does not deal centrally with issues of race and racial justice, engaging these issues in a way that is related to the course topic and advances Geneseo’s 2020-21 initiative of Becoming an Antiracist College. (All original content must be shared in Geneseo Canvas Commons and Creative Commons-licensed, so that other Geneseo faculty may incorporate the content into their own courses. Recipients of this incentive must commit to publishing, no later than March 1, 2021 a post on this blog explaining how the race and racial justice content informed the course.)

General requirements and reminders

• For the section enrollment incentive, no instructor may earn more than $1000 (one payment each of $500 for two different courses that enroll sufficiently and run).
• The minimum enrollment for a course to run at full base compensation is eight students.
• The minimum enrollment for a course to be eligible for the section enrollment incentive is twelve students.
• For the course-improvement incentive, no instructor may earn more than $500.
• For the antiracism incentive, no instructor may earn more than $500.
• For each course, the instructor may earn either the course-improvement or the antiracism incentive.
• The maximum amount that any instructor may receive in incentive payments for a single course in Intersession 2021 is $1000, or $1500 for two courses.
• All incentives other than the enrollment incentive will be awarded only for courses that contain significant instructor-generated content. Faculty may not earn incentives merely for uploading or linking to content from publishers (e.g., Cengage).

Deadlines at a glance

• For declaring interest in earning one or more of the above incentives: December 1, 2020
• For implementing best-practice improvements: December 14, 2020
• For publishing in Canvas (for students enrolled in the course) a fully developed online course that deals centrally with issues of race and racial justice in a way that advances Geneseo’s 2020-21 theme of Becoming an Antiracist College: January 4, 2021.
• For sharing to Canvas Commons CC-licensed course content or a fully developed, CC-licensed course module dealing with issues of race and racial justice in a way that advances Geneseo’s 2020-21 theme of Becoming an Antiracist College: January 4, 2021.
• For submitting a completed blog post for the CDL blog (required only for antiracism incentive #3): March 1, 2021.

Note: This post was updated on 2020-10-06 to insert a link to Geneseo’s page on Becoming an Antiracist College.