Making Time: Moving the Faculty Dossier to an Electronic Format

With the shortage of nursing faculty comes the challenge of an increasing workload and the competing demands for time required for teaching, service, and scholarship. Faculty must demonstrate their excellence in each of these areas as they prepare dossiers for annual reviews, tenure, and promotion. This article explores how technology can help faculty find additional time to achieve the expectations of higher education and establish an ongoing repository of faculty data and documentation. To accomplish this, the authors designed a faculty electronic dossier (e-dossier), using Blackboard technology to replace the traditional paper dossier. This article describes the process of designing the faculty e-dossier and presenting it to the faculty and administrators and discussing the acceptance of this innovative change. The authors use Rogers' (Rogers E. (1983). Diffusion of innovation (3rd ed.) (rev.ed.) London: The Free Press.) diffusion of innovation theory to understand why faculty were more accepting of this innovation than were administrators and how to address this difference.

Index words: Faculty, Annual review, Tenure and promotion, E-dossier, Technology, Diffusion of innovation