Event: Creating Your Faculty Website

Date: September 9, 2016

Brief Description:  This workshop introduced WordPress as a tool for creating a website to document teaching, research, and service for the university and for students to ‘meet’ their instructors as well as to receive immediate information on course, instructor, and student expectations.

Three Lessons/Key Points

1. It has become the norm for faculty to have websites that showcase their teaching, research, and service.

2. I need to be proactive in ‘pushing out’ information about my teaching, research, and service.

3. WordPress is FREE(!!) for ODU faculty and students to create websites.

Unanswered Questions

1. Are there better or worse ways to present information on a website that balances aesthetics with informational content?

2. How frequently do I need to update my website’s content?

Academic Career Preparation

This event better prepared me for the research, teaching, and service expectations and demands of a faculty member by making me think about providing a one-stop web-based resource to present information about my teaching, research, and service.  It also make me realize the importance of document and save evidence (i.e., archive) of my development as a teacher and researcher.  However, there is an important challenge of not just archiving via a website but also creating a showcase site that aesthetically presents the information.