Building a Do-It-Yourself Website to Engage and Inform Geographically Diverse Faculties

The College of Humanities and Sciences is a large and geographically dispersed organization with thousands of faculty and hundreds of staff at 26 campuses nationwide. One challenge we are facing as an organization is how to connect with each other across geographies, content areas, and campuses. When considering how to bridge this gap, we realized that we needed a single place for our community to converge and engage.

In that moment of realization, our new faculty community website was conceived. We wanted to create one space for one faculty where all of us could meet and engage across all campuses as a single college body.

Some of the features of the community website include:

• Community of Practice: Faculty explore teaching practices that really work, and share them with colleagues;
• Community of Scholars: Faculty get help and support so they can successfully produce various kinds of scholarship;
• Faculty Recognition: Faculty read about who is making a difference, and participate in recognizing their peers for their contributions to the college;
• Resources: Faculty easily locate a large number of resources to help them and their students learn and grow.

We plan to present the considerations and benefits to building such a website,, and conclude the presentation with a web tour of the site’s features.