Category: Blog

A Plan to Build an Open Source Tool to Assess Student Skills and Predict Success

by Lisa Cook (opens in new tab)

SPOTLIGHT ON INNOVATION SERIES The US Department of Education has awarded multi-million dollar “First in the World” grants to 18 colleges and universities that are innovating to solve critical challenges with access, recruitment, retention, and student success. At AI, we have interviewed each of the recipients to learn more about the projects these institutions are pursuing, how their approaches are unique, and what other colleges and universities can learn from these new efforts. This was the second year of the First in the World grants. You can read our interviews with the 24 institutions that received 2014 grants at the link here. Higher education for most students begins with proctored high-stakes placement exams that may not be the best approach, according to Jason Bryer, director of research and project evaluation at Excelsior College.  Proctored exams can be intimidating, especially at open-enrollment institutions where more than half of students are directed into non-credit remediation courses at an estimated cost of $4 billion per year. Excelsior College hopes to improve students’ early college experiences by developing an open-source assessment tool to measure student skills in academic and non-academic areas. They will use the $1.9 million First in the World grant to address the […]

What Starbucks Can Teach You about Equipping Your Staff as Ambassadors for Your Institution

by Tim Ponisciak (University of Notre Dame) Many annual giving departments have an employee program, or at the very least an annual employee appeal. While some schools are quite successful and have a high percentage of alumni making a gift, most struggle with convincing staff to contribute to their employer. But is this the best way to engage university employees in annual giving? Treating Employees as Ambassadors, Not Just Prospects Employees of a school can be the most important ambassadors of their institution. Often, staff are the first people that an alum or donor speaks to when they get to campus. They are the ones that solve problems for alumni when they call the campus. And some employees are the long-time connections to campus for alumni, regardless of what development officer they have been assigned to. Does your school have a brand ambassador program, guidelines, or annual training for staff? Many companies that place a strong emphasis on customer service know that this starts by making sure that their employees, whether they be administration or front line, are completely bought in to their company’s mission. There are lessons here that we can adapt from the corporate sector. Case Study: Starbucks […]

Math and the Liberal Arts: How the University System of Maryland Will Create New Math Pathways for Social Sciences and Liberal Arts Students

by Lisa Cook (opens in new tab)

SPOTLIGHT ON INNOVATION SERIES The US Department of Education has awarded multi-million dollar “First in the World” grants to 18 colleges and universities that are innovating to solve critical challenges with access, recruitment, retention, and student success. At AI, we have interviewed each of the recipients to learn more about the projects these institutions are pursuing, how their approaches are unique, and what other colleges and universities can learn from these new efforts. This was the second year of the First in the World grants. You can read our interviews with the 24 institutions that received 2014 grants here. Both developmental and college-level math courses can often be a stumbling block for liberal arts and social sciences majors, who wonder if they’ll ever use college algebra in their future careers. While many institutions provide supplemental support for these students, officials at the University System of Maryland want to try a different approach. They plan to pilot new math pathways that are more relevant to the quantitative skills needed in arts and humanities disciplines. They will use their $2.98 million First in the World grant to introduce a new statistics curriculum that will provide more real-world applications than traditional remedial algebra courses […]

4 Things Academic Deans Can Do to Connect Majors and Minors with Careers

by Stanton Green (opens in new tab)

In my previous article with AI (“4 Things Academic Deans Can Do to Help Students Succeed After Graduation,” in August 2015), I offered advice on how academic deans and career professionals can collaborate to improve student career mentoring. In this follow-up article, I would like to offer four curricular strategies that can immediately improve student career prospects, by connecting more clearly what a student studies and what they aspire to do after college. Four strategies to make this happen: 1. Work directly with admissions to break the myth that specific majors lead to specific jobs. I have often found myself speaking to groups of prospective students and their parents immediately after an admissions director has literally drawn lines between specific majors and particular jobs. “If you want to be an A you should consider majoring in X,” s/he would exclaim, much to my chagrin. Parents especially like this equation, while students who are often not sure of what ‘they want to be’ usually find it uncomfortable. My subsequent presentation forcefully (and politely) breaks this myth by focusing on three simple notions: WHAT TO DO: Develop a small team that includes an academic dean, an admissions director and a career services director […]

Bossier Parish Community College: Improving Developmental Education with MOOCs, Mobile Apps, and Asynchronous Learning

SPOTLIGHT ON INNOVATION SERIES The US Department of Education has awarded multi-million dollar “First in the World” grants to 18 colleges and universities that are innovating to solve critical challenges with access, recruitment, retention, and student success. At AI, we have interviewed each of the recipients to learn more about the projects these institutions are pursuing, how their approaches are unique, and what other colleges and universities can learn from these new efforts. This was the second year of the First in the World grants. You can read our interviews with the 24 institutions that received 2014 grants here. by Lisa Cook, Academic Impressions Developmental education courses have a notoriously high drop/fail/withdraw rate; in our 2013 paper Why Rethinking Developmental Education is a Priority, we profiled several institutions that had reworked their dev-ed curriculum in innovative ways. Now, Bossier Parish Community College is working on a new approach: using analytics-based mobile applications embedded in developmental courses to improve student success. BPCC’s app will serve two purposes: Students will have easy access to support for their classes, anytime, anywhere. The app will also provide analytics data so BPCC can isolate and track which efforts are working to improve student engagement and persistence. BPCC […]

How Farmingdale State College is Engaging At-Risk Students in Undergraduate Research

by Lisa Cook (opens in new tab), Daniel Fusch (opens in new tab)

A pilot project at Farmingdale State College is engaging both freshmen and transfer students in undergraduate research. Here are the details. SPOTLIGHT ON INNOVATION SERIES The US Department of Education has awarded multi-million dollar “First in the World” grants to 18 colleges and universities that are innovating to solve critical challenges with access, recruitment, retention, and student success. At AI, we have interviewed each of the recipients to learn more about the projects these institutions are pursuing, how their approaches are unique, and what other colleges and universities can learn from these new efforts. This was the second year of the First in the World grants. You can read our interviews with the 24 institutions that received 2014 grants here. Officials at Farmingdale State College, State University of New York, hope to boost degree completion of at-risk students by engaging them actively in undergraduate research. Their new project, “Creating Research Opportunities for Students,” will use their $2.9 million 2015 First in the World grant to mentor and prepare students for research and then offer a hands-on research experience with a faculty mentor, conducted both on- and off-campus. They project that the initiative will increase their four-year graduation rate by 20%. Familiar […]

High-Impact Faculty Development: How El Camino College Helps Faculty Implement Learning-Centered Techniques in the Classroom

by Lisa Cook (opens in new tab)

Have you experienced this scenario? Your faculty members attend a professional development training and return to campus excited to try new ideas. Fast-forward a few months…and little has changed because pedagogical transformation was shunted aside in favor of day-to-day teaching and research obligations. When this scenario happened at El Camino College, a group of faculty decided to change it. “Life’s very, very busy so it’s hard to take this next step,” explains Kristie Daniel-DiGregorio, Professor of Human Development. Along with her colleagues, she noticed that faculty would feel “electrified” by training, but that afterward, techniques were only implemented in an ad hoc fashion. She and a team of her colleagues wondered what would happen if the college continued to support their professional development on an ongoing basis after the training concluded. El Camino’s Faculty Inquiry Partnership Program — FIPP — was created to do just that. And they’ve been tracking the results. Student success rates in courses taught by faculty who participated in FIPP are two percent higher than rates in courses taught by faculty who had not attended. More than 90% of students reported that the strategies faculty in FIPP employed helped them better understand the material and increased their […]

How 2 Library Directors Have Transformed Their Academic Libraries

As our article “The Library of the 21st Century” attests, the academic library continues to evolve at a rapid pace, and library administrators across higher education continue to wrestle with the question of how best to adapt their libraries to changing student and other user needs on campus. There is a lot of uncertainty about how best to revitalize the library space so that it becomes — or continues to be — student-centered, flexible, and reflective of the institution’s academic mission. At Academic Impressions, we have engaged hundreds of library directors in conversation — with us and with each other — in our annual library revitalization conference, which we founded in 2007. Recently, we sat down with two directors — Karen Clay (Library Director of Pierce Library at Eastern Oregon University) and Sara Bushong (Dean of University Libraries at Bowling Green State University) — to learn how they continued that conversation on their own campuses after the event, and what approaches they have taken to successfully modernize their own libraries to meet current user needs. In this interview, Clay and Bushong present slideshows of “before and after” photos of their academic libraries, and discuss in detail how they were able to: We […]

How Do You Really Know if a Student is At Risk? How John Carroll University is Looking into This

by Lisa Cook (opens in new tab)

What is an at-risk student? And is just measuring persistence enough? What are the most critical indicators to track? SPOTLIGHT ON INNOVATION SERIES The US Department of Education has awarded multi-million dollar “First in the World” grants to 18 colleges and universities that are innovating to solve critical challenges with access, recruitment, retention, and student success. At AI, we have interviewed each of the recipients to learn more about the projects these institutions are pursuing, how their approaches are unique, and what other colleges and universities can learn from these new efforts. This was the second year of the First in the World grants. You can read our interviews with the 24 institutions that received 2014 grants here. John Carroll University has been working to improve student success measures for low-income students: work they’ve already seen pay off among their students who receive Pell Grants. On average, there is a 5.7 percentage point gap in the graduation rates of students who receive Pell Grants and those who do not, but at JCU there is no gap at all. JCU’s Pell Grant students also boast a six-year graduation rate of 75 percent vs. the national average of 51 percent. This fall, JCU received […]

Powered by Predictive Data: How Central Carolina Community College Will Identify and Support At-Risk Students through Proactive Coaching

by Lisa Cook (opens in new tab)

For boosting completion rates for at-risk students, how much of a difference can structured student coaching make? Here’s what Central Carolina Community College is trying. SPOTLIGHT ON INNOVATION SERIES The US Department of Education has awarded multi-million dollar “First in the World” grants to 18 colleges and universities that are innovating to solve critical challenges with access, recruitment, retention, and student success. At AI, we have interviewed each of the recipients to learn more about the projects these institutions are pursuing, how their approaches are unique, and what other colleges and universities can learn from these new efforts. This was the second year of the First in the World grants. You can read our interviews with the 24 institutions that received 2014 grants here. Central Carolina Community College set out to improve completion rates for at-risk students by embedding success coaches in targeted departments in Spring 2013, as part of a larger initiative funded by a 2012 Title III grant that included launching a College Success Center, adding the team of success coaches, and implementing an early alert advising system. The addition of coaching has already led to a 13 percent increase in student persistence. Now, with the help of a $9.2 million […]

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