Explaining the Challenges and Strategies for the Development of Educational Scholarship in Faculty Members of Mazandaran University of Medical Sciences; Qualitative Study

Scholarship is an integral aspect of academia, educational scholarship is the kind of outstanding scientific activity and innovation in the fields of discovery, education, application of original research results, and integration of information obtained from different components of a field or different scientific fields. The identification of  the strategies for the development of educational research in the faculty members of the universities can provide a suitable background for the excellence and growth of the medical universities, considering that in the search made in the sources, there are evidences of monitoring the presentation of the solutions. And we did not find the challenges of developing educational research, this study was conducted to investigate and analyze the challenges and solutions of developing educational research from the perspective of the academic staff of Mazandaran University of Medical Sciences.

The current research was a qualitative and content analysis type of research. The samples of this study were selected purposefully. The samples included academic faculty members who have innovative educational processes and academic faculty members who participated in scholarship workshops and developed innovative educational processes but did not develop a process. The collection of information continued until the collected data was a repetition of the previous data so that no new information was found and data saturation took place. For data collection, semi-structured interview with a focused group discussion method were used, and for data analysis, the conventional content analysis method was used.

After merging the codes extracted from two focus group discussion sessions and repeated revisions, 75 codes were finally identified. Then, these codes were classified into 14 categories, which include educational leadership and management, inappropriate policies, empowerment, financial resources, material and spiritual support, information resources, supportive educational environment, group and teamwork, publishing results, creating a culture of innovation, and identifying needs. Education, change management, mentoring, and interdisciplinary convergence. Finally, the first 6 categories below were placed under the theme of challenges and the other 8 categories were placed under the theme of solutions.

The results of this study showed that from the point of view of university faculty members, the most important challenges in the development of educational scholarship are the difficulty of developing educational processes, the high score of research activities compared to research activities, the alienation of academic staff members from research and educational processes, and the most important solutions for the development of scholarship; The promotion of interprofessional cooperation for the formulation of educational processes, the use of change management for the development of scholarship activities, the development of group activities for Scholarship activities in educational groups.