Key considerations for developing an equitable faculty teaching workload.

PURPOSE: Faculty teaching workload has become a focus for many academic institutions given the increasing amount of faculty burnout and need for equitable distribution of effort. Many gaps exist in faculty workload guidance which contribute to decreased faculty productivity, lack of appropriate recognition, faculty burnout, and subsequently, retention of faculty. A task force was created to develop teaching workload guidance and to outline minimum teaching expectations at our school of pharmacy. DESCRIPTION: This manuscript highlights the need for clarity around the definition of roles of the contemporary educator and considerations when developing guidance around teaching workload expectations using the "What? So What? Now What?" reflection framework. ANALYSIS/INTERPRETATION: Teaching workload guidance first starts with establishing a definition of the contemporary roles of the educator. Challenges, considerations, and eight next steps are outlined that are critical to address before equitable teaching workload guidance is established. CONCLUSIONS: Teaching workload guidance should include transparency, clarity, credit, norms, context, and accountability. Additionally, solutions created to address the gaps in workload policies should be data driven. IMPLICATIONS: The current traditional system of evaluating faculty workload has many gaps due to forces driving change in pharmacy education. Roles of the pharmacy educator should be valued and recognized across all mission centric learning programs.

Defining contemporary roles of the pharmacy educator: The essential first step in developing equitable faculty teaching workload.

INTRODUCTION: Faculty workload policy has gained increased attention recently given the growing amount of faculty burnout leading to decreased productivity, worsened faculty morale, and impaired retention. Faculty are one of the most valuable resources of an academic institution; thus, it is essential that a clear picture of the "jobs to be done" are defined and valued. PERSPECTIVE: The approach of a task force charged with developing a teaching workload policy is described. Through this work, it was recognized that essential roles of the contemporary pharmacy educator have not been defined, resulting in workload policies that might only value and recognize "traditional" educator roles. This led the task force to evaluate the forces driving change in education and to identify the roles of faculty as educators. The stepwise approach used to define nine essential roles of contemporary pharmacy educators is described. IMPLICATIONS: Roles of the educator have become more complex, and traditional definitions of these roles do not recognize and value the multifaceted nature of the job to be done. Consideration of contemporary definitions of educator roles is a critical first step for developing workload policies. The new definition of educator roles will allow the academic institution to have more clarity around total teaching effort and recognize the value faculty provide the institution. We believe this is the essential first step for the Academy when developing teaching workload policies that are fair and equitable, while also understanding the overall faculty needs for executing their educational enterprise.

Implementation and Initial Evaluation of a Research and Scholarship Training Pathway in a Doctor of Pharmacy Curriculum.

Objective. To design, implement, and assess the initial impact of a pharmacy student research and scholarship training pathway.Methods. The Research and Scholarship in Pharmacy (RASP) pathway was designed to create a longitudinal, elective pathway within a Doctor of Pharmacy (PharmD) curriculum at a single institution. The pathway consisted of three elective courses built around a faculty-mentored scholarly project where students framed an answerable question, generated and interpreted relevant data, and communicated their findings in oral and written form. Following implementation, a retrospective, multi-method analysis was conducted to evaluate the impact of the program on the initial two student cohorts that completed it and assess their perceptions of the value of the pathway.Results. Fifty students (25 in each of two cohorts) completed the three-course sequence. Students were supported by 33 distinct faculty mentors. Thirty-eight (76%) students presented an abstract derived from their project at a national meeting. The first cohort exit survey (96% response rate) revealed positive student perceptions regarding the value of and satisfaction with the research pathway. Twenty-three (96%) students were satisfied with their research experience, 21 (88%) were satisfied with their faculty mentor, and 24 (100%) were satisfied with their development of project management skills. In the first cohort, 10 (40%) students published an original research manuscript within one year of graduation.Conclusion. The Research and Scholarship in Pharmacy pathway feasibly and effectively provided a mechanism for students to engage in a faculty-mentored longitudinal research experience within a PharmD curriculum that promoted skill development and opportunities for scholarship. Initial implementation demonstrated high rates of student satisfaction, low rates of student attrition, and high rates of scholarly output.

Illumination stimulates cAMP receptor protein-dependent transcriptional activation from regulatory regions containing class I and class II promoter elements in Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803.

The cAMP receptor protein (Crp) is a global transcriptional regulator that binds sequence-specific promoter elements when associated with cAMP. In the motile cyanobacterium Synechocystis sp. strain PCC 6803, intracellular cAMP increases when dark-adapted cells are illuminated. Previous work has established that Crp binds proposed Crp target sites upstream of slr1351 (murF), sll1874 (chlA(II)), sll1708 (narL), slr0442 and sll1268 in vitro, and that slr0442 is downregulated in a crp mutant during photoautotrophic growth. To identify additional Crp target genes in Synechocystis, 11 different Crp binding sites proposed during a previous computational survey were tested for in vitro sequence-specific binding and crp-dependent transcription. The results indicate that murF, chlA(II) and slr0442 can be added as 'target genes of Sycrp1' in Synechocystis. Promoter mapping of the targets revealed the same close association of RNA polymerase and Crp as that found in Escherichia coli class I and class II Crp-regulated promoters, thereby strongly suggesting similar mechanisms of transcriptional activation.