Fashion Institute of Technology-SUNY is located in midtown Manhattan. With the goal of improving teaching and learning through broad-based professional development, the College’s Faculty Development Program, anchored by the Center for Excellence in Teaching (CET), supports faculty in the development, use, and assessment of effective instructional and curricular strategies.

Like most public community colleges, the majority (70%) of the FIT faculty are adjunct, often with little teacher training and generally assigned lower level courses that include the college’s most inexperienced student learners (NCES; Adjunct Academy at Citytech, FIPSE 2008). Part-time faculty are frequently hired on short notice and rarely receive the orientation that would better ensure successful teaching/learning.

FIT provides a comprehensive, two-day orientation for new full-time faculty. However, no formal campus-wide orientation for adjunct faculty existed before 2017-18. Thanks to the support of FIT’s Academic Affairs and an earlier internal Student-Faculty Corporation grant, the CET was able to develop an online adjunct orientation that mirrored the existing fulltime face to face event and could reach an unlimited number of new faculty http://www.fitnyc.edu/cet/adjunct-faculty/index.php

This 60-minute presentation will explore the challenges---but also the solutions that have been successfully implemented at FIT to provide this invaluable resource to FIT’s, part-time faculty. It is hoped that this presentation might also serve as a faculty development model for other SUNY campuses facing like challenges.