Approximately 25% of students begin college at a time other than fall term, yet many institutions don’t reflect this in their onboarding processes. Recent research suggests that students starting in non-fall terms encounter substantially different challenges in campus orientation, socialization, and academic performance. These challenges pose a direct threat to both student retention and success. The onboarding process for spring admits begins well before the term itself and is critical to building strategies for student success. Join us to learn about current research and hear practical examples for implementing suggested best practices.
Effectively balancing both the immediate and long-term institutional goals of space efficiency requires a sophisticated understanding of all campus space. Yet, many space administrators continue to work with rudimentary databases that reveal little beyond room type, location, and square footage. Administrators who are able to redefine and allocate space according to room condition, technology specifications, occupancy, and other telling characteristics possess the sophisticated data necessary to cut through challenging political barriers and become better advocates for the existing space on their campus. Join us for an online training that walks through the process of building and implementing a robust space database that provides the information to drive data-informed decisions on your campus. You will leave with key considerations and an overarching framework for transforming your space tracking techniques in developing a strategic space model for your institution.
Does general education represent a canon of knowledge, a set of skills, readiness for a student’s major, or simply a certain number of credits? These questions, along with increasing employer demands and student expectations for developing necessary competencies make it imperative to carefully assess your institution’s general education program. However, general education is difficult to assess because students’ core competencies can be obtained through various pathways. Join your colleagues in this webcast to discuss various methods for assessing the goals and quality of general education. Our expert instructor will focus on using low cost, low effort, turn-key tools to assess general education. This assessment approach, if done effectively, leads to improved student learning and addresses the skills gap that employers demand.
Advancement shops are increasingly turning to predictive models to assess their donor pools and ensure that their most valuable donors are receiving the appropriate level of attention. Despite this trend, many front-line fundraisers are still unclear about what predictive modeling is, how it can be leveraged in their everyday work, and how to calculate a return on investment from the use of predictive models. Join us online to learn the fundamentals of predictive modeling and how your shop can use this model to guide your fundraising strategy. You will hear case studies from institutions across the country that have successfully integrated predictive modeling into their operations.Included in your registration fee is a comprehensive glossary of terms commonly used when discussing predictive analytics.
Empowering students to mentor and advise peers can reduce staff workload and free up resources to be leveraged elsewhere on campus. However, detailed planning is required to ensure that your peer mentor programs seamlessly integrate with your first-year student programs. Before launching a program of your own, you must learn how to effectively: Identify where peer mentors can influence first-year persistence Recruit and train peer mentors Assess your program’s effectiveness Join us to learn how to build a peer mentor component into your first-year student programming. Centered on Longwood University’s model, this webcast will prepare you to design a program that utilizes a team of peer mentors to engage first-year students and positively affect student persistence.
Do you have limited resources for your planned giving program? Students are a low-cost and effective option for reaching out and connecting with your most loyal donors. Join us online as our expert instructor introduces a student calling program that consistently uncovers current leadership giving members and exceptional prospects. Along with gaining a thorough understanding of how to begin such an initiative at your institution, you will learn tactics for: Selecting, motivating, training, and retaining the right student callers Communicating your effort internally and externally Managing handoffs between student callers and professional staff Getting started in a variety of shop settings
To accommodate increasing demands for flexibility from students, many institutions offer online orientations. However, not all online orientations are effective retention tools, and they may be inferior to in-person orientations. Is your online orientation interactive, assessment based, and conducive to learning? You can increase the effectiveness of your online orientation programs by implementing research-supported online instructional strategies. This webcast will help you develop or improve your online orientation with a learner-centered approach to programming for new students. Showcasing sample online orientation activities, our expert instructor will provide tips based on research and practice, so you can develop a more effective and engaging online orientation at your institution.
Mid-career faculty members (tenured-system faculty members) form a large and important component of the academic workforce who experience unique challenges. Academic life has a short career ladder, and many tenured faculty members reach a plateau where opportunities for advancement decline. Further, there has been relatively little research on tenured faculty and on best practices to support tenured faculty members through this extended career stage. Join our expert instructors online to identify the needs, interests, and challenges of tenured faculty members as well as productive practices and recommendations to address them. Featuring the award-winning work done at Michigan State University, this webcast can serve as a starting point for an important conversation within your faculty leadership team.
Online instruction continues to thrive, but instructors and designers struggle to develop effective forms of online assessment. How can an instructor know if students are meeting course objectives or achieving area competencies if tests and quizzes are not primary assessments? How can you ensure academic integrity and curb online cheating? What other forms of assessment are particularly effective in an online environment? Join us online to learn how to design and develop assessment tools in online instructional environments. Our expert instructor will share examples of assessment questions and how to improve them.
Once you have defined your institution’s strategic messages and found your leader’s voice, the next task for your speechwriting assignment is to get words on the page. But knowing how to keep your listeners’ attention can be especially challenging when you aren’t a full-time speechwriter. Join our expert instructor, Chuck Toney, online for easy-to-implement tips on how to effectively incorporate technical and rhetorical tactics into your next speechwriting assignment. You will learn how to prepare the physical text of the speech and how to add impact through devices such as repetition, alliteration, rhythm, and emphasis. You will also leave the session with three types of speeches every campus speechwriter should have ready for delivery.
