Author: greta@academicimpressions.com

Do Your Living-Learning Communities Offer a Comprehensive Immersion Experience?

August 4, 2011. Living-learning communities offer high potential for boosting the academic success and the education of the whole student, but they also present your campus with unique challenges because of the coordination they require between academic affairs and student services at your institution. The National Study of Living-Learning Programs (NSLLP) has begun documenting how living-learning programs influence the academic, social, and developmental outcomes for college students, as well as what characteristics are shared by those programs that show the greatest impact. This week, we interviewed two chief researchers from the NSLLP — Aaron Brower, vice provost for teaching and learning at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Karen Inkelas, associate professor and director for the Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education at the University of Virginia. Brower and Inkelas suggest that while many institutions have organized living-learning programs, few offer a truly integrated, comprehensive, and immersive learning experience for the students. Here is their advice. Intentionality is Key “Depending on the goals you have set for the program, you really have to do the hard work (and the fun work) of thinking through how those goals play out in every interaction within the residential learning community.” […]

Make Your Threat Assessment Team Effective: Part 1

This is the first of two articles offering practical advice on making behavioral intervention teams effective. The second article, which will focus on five pitfalls to avoid, will appear in late August. An abbreviated version of this article appeared in an earlier edition of Higher Ed Impact. August 4, 2011. In today’s difficult economic climate, most institutions of higher education are facing significant reductions in counseling and mental health budgets at a time when the mental health needs of students, faculty, and staff are on the rise. In a recent survey by the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors, 77 percent of counseling center directors indicated that the number of students on campus with severe mental health issues had increased in the past year. And while most available studies focus on student mental health, last year’s shooting at the University of Alabama in Huntsville offers a tragic reminder that faculty and staff may also face mental health issues. We asked Gene Deisinger, deputy chief of police and director of threat management services at Virginia Tech, for his advice on how to establish early behavioral intervention teams or threat assessment teams when challenged to do more with existing resources. Deisinger is both a police […]

What Engagement-Focused Fundraising Looks Like

July 28, 2011. According to a national survey of higher education alumni conducted by the Collaborative Innovation Network for Engagement and Giving and presented to the Annual Giving Directors Consortium (April 2010), only 52 percent of alumni at those institutions with the highest alumni participation rates believe their alma mater keeps them closely connected and values its alumni relationships. At the same time, institutions are trying to meet fundraising goals by calling on fewer and fewer donors. Now is the time for your institution to stop this unsustainable advancement strategy. We turned this week to Jim Langley, president of Langley Innovations, for his advice on how institutions need to rethink their strategy for engaging future donors. A Diagnosis: How Institutions and Alumni Misconnect “The underlying malady,” Langley remarks, “is a loss of emotional engagement with the institution. Alumni remain appreciative of their degree and of their time at the institution, but feel emotionally detached from the alma mater after graduation.” This disaffection can take different forms for different generations of alumni: Young alumni are likely to have graduated with a significant load of student debt and are now facing the challenges of building a career amid a sluggish economic recovery; when […]

Encouraging the Success of Online Students

July 28, 2011. The past decade has seen a plethora of research studies attempting to document the impact of online learning on measures of academic success and student persistence. The studies often produce widely divergent results, in part because institutions vary dramatically in the level of support and preparation they offer to both students and faculty. To inquire into best practices for preparing both faculty and students for online courses, we turned to two online learning veterans to learn more: Kristen Betts, director of the Center for Online Learning at Armstrong Atlantic State University, and Mark Parker, interim assistant dean and collegiate associate professor for communication, arts, and humanities at the University of Maryland University College (UMUC). Betts and Parker suggest that the most critical steps in encouraging the academic success and persistence of your online students involve setting and managing faculty and student expectations around workload and interaction within the online course. Here are some examples. Managing Expectations for Students Betts and Parker advise institutions to be more proactive in setting expectations both: When marketing online programs to students (while promoting the flexibility of an online program, it’s important to also set expectations around the program’s rigor and the quality of student work that is […]

Getting Started With Advancement Staff Metrics

July 28, 2011. As advancement shops in higher education struggle with a slow economic recovery, it is increasingly important to build staff metrics that encourage effective work. Tracking meaningful metrics beyond dollars raised can empower you to: Reward high performers, making it easier to retain your best officers Identify training needs Incentivize cross-boundary work toward shared goals For advice on taking fundraising metrics beyond dollars raised, we turned this week to Rick Dupree, assistant dean of development and alumni relations for the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University, and D. Scott Peters, director of annual giving at the University of Richmond. A Culture of Incentives “A good metrics system means that development officers know what’s expected, they know what will happen if they meet and exceed goals. It takes away the guessing game. Development officers are entrepreneurs at heart — they have egos, they’re creative, they want to do excellent work and be recognized for it.” Rick Dupree, Indiana U Dupree adds that the 100-point metrics program he put in place a decade ago at Indiana University allowed him to do “two atypical things” — offer bonuses and terminate low performers. He assigned points for achieving specific goals. “If a staff […]

Preparing First-Generation Students for Academic Success

Given the lower retention rates of first-generation students, more colleges and universities are devoting attention to how best to aid the success and persistence of this cohort. To learn more about how higher ed institutions can respond to the issue, we turned this week to Thom Golden, senior associate director of admissions at Vanderbilt University (@Doctor_Thom on Twitter). This week, Golden draws attention to the types of bridge programming that higher ed institutions can put in place to help first-gen students enter college better prepared to persist and succeed. Defining the Problem “In enrolling and retaining first-generation students, aspiration isn’t the issue,” Golden notes. He directs attention to findings from several studies from past years: According to the Ad Council’s 2006 study College access: Results from a survey of low-income teens and parents, 91 percent of low-income high school students said they believed that they would complete a college degree According to a 2006 US Department of Education study, The Toolbox Revisited, only 45 percent of Hispanic students attend a high school that offers calculus, and only 59 percent of white students do Outreach to high schools and to high school students, Golden suggests, must focus less on planting seeds of […]

Coordinating Sustainability Efforts Across Campus

If your institution’s leadership has already made a public commitment to sustainability, then it is important to educate the president, provost, and chief financial officer about the whole picture of the sustainability efforts already under way on campus, and what opportunities there may be for building further. It will be important to define, as quickly as possible, what sustainability means at your institution. Is it limited to energy efficiency? Is it broader in scope? What does your college or university want to achieve? This definition should be arrived at collaboratively, with input from students, institutional leaders, and sustainability champions at your institution. If sustainability efforts at your institution are operating at a grassroots level, then auditing and building coordination between current efforts, developing a full cost accounting tool, and marketing your successes can be key efforts in cultivating investment by both institutional leadership and the campus community. Whether you are starting with an executive commitment or with a grassroots effort, the critical early step is to audit what is already happening on campus and what resources are already available to you. Then you will be better-equipped to coordinate across departments and scale up. To move from a series of ad […]

A Sustainable Approach to Sustainability

Whether driven by a desire for social impact, or the harsh economic realities of unsustainable utilities expenditures, or by political and market demand, more colleges and universities are taking the trend to become more environmentally sustainable seriously. More than 650 institutional presidents have pledged carbon neutrality as signatories to the American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment (APUCC), and hundreds of institutions now employ sustainability coordinators. Yet many sustainability initiatives have yet to see meaningful gains. In fact, at the majority of colleges and universities, sustainability efforts remain limited to disparate, one-off programs, from trayless dining to student-directed recycling programs to “green” capital projects and energy efficiency measures. To move beyond one-off programs, it’s critical to identify how efforts toward a sustainable campus add benefits beyond just cost savings and social impact. Defining the value proposition for sustainability at your campus and mapping the impact of sustainability on a wide array of campus priorities (e.g., student recruitment and retention, stakeholder relations and fundraising, etc.) will empower an institution to more effectively target campus-wide or system-wide investment in sustainable initiatives, and to better engage broader campus constituencies and build alliances beyond the “usual choir.” “The question to address now is: How do you get […]

A Road Map for Campus Sustainability

by Amit Mrig

In this report: A Sustainable Approach to Sustainability Coordinating Sustainability Efforts Across Campus Integrating Sustainability into Curricular and Co-curricular Programs Efficiency and Cost Control Leveraging Early Successes to Increase Funding and Involvement A Letter From Amit Mrig, President, Academic Impressions July 2011. Whether your institution is driven by social values, economic reality, or political and market demand, the trend to become more sustainable is undeniable. Yet, with all of the momentum throughout the industry and society writ large, including more than 650 campus presidents pledging carbon neutrality, most sustainability efforts have a difficult time achieving meaningful gains. Such efforts are often driven more by the individual will of a student, faculty member, or campus president than through smart planning, implementation, and resourcing. This reality was the impetus for the Academic Impressions Sustainability Road Map – a methodology that advocates for an integrated, scalable approach to campus sustainability, and one that can help generate broad-based support and buy-in. We’ve gathered experts from the leading green institutions to share their insights on how to maximize the economic, social, and environmental returns on these investments. We hope their advice will be useful. Read the paper.   See Upcoming Events for Academic Administrators

Improving the Accessibility of Online Course Materials

July 7, 2011. In a climate of increased demand for online courses and increased federal scrutiny of regulatory compliance, it is increasingly critical that colleges and universities ensure the accessibility of their online course materials for students with disabilities — and not only for online courses, but also for classes held in the physical classroom that direct students to pursue research online or access supplemental materials via a course management system. Fortunately, significant gains in accessibility can be made with relative ease — the key is to be proactive and plan for them early rather than after an issue is noticed. To learn more about the “low-hanging fruit” for accessibility of course materials, we interviewed two leading experts on the issue from Drexel University — Dan Allen, content management specialist with Drexel’s Office of Information Resources and Technology, and Jenny Dugger, director of Drexel’s Office of Disability Services. Allen and Dugger offer the following tips for: Vetting potential vendors for accessibility Coaching your faculty in making course materials more accessible Vet Potential Vendors, Thoroughly “Where institutions often get into trouble is when they don’t vet their vendors for accessibility; by the time they realize there are issues, they have already made a long-term […]