Course Category: Free for All-Inclusive Members

Integrating Peer Mentors Across First-Year Student Programs

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.

Planned Giving: Using Student Callers

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

Online Orientation: Focusing on Student Learning

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.

Supporting Mid-Career Faculty Webcast Recording

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.

Measuring the Costs of Developmental Education

The cost of providing developmental coursework to underprepared students in the U.S. is an estimated $1.4–$2 billion annually. What is the true cost of developmental education for an institution, and how is it measured? Join us online to hear Tristan Denley, a thought leader in developmental education, share his perspective on measuring the true costs of admitting conditionally or provisionally designated students. Highlighting the work done at Austin Peay State University, Denley will provide suggestions on how you can better understand these costs and how you can ultimately reduce costs and improve retention by offering credit-bearing developmental courses.

Connecting Planning and Budgeting in Student Affairs

Strategic planning processes should be about creating a shared vision that all members of a student affairs division get behind. However, most experiences with long-term planning fall flat, in part because planning is often not connected to resource allocation or assessment. Join us online as we identify the most common strategic planning and budgeting pitfalls and offer solutions that can help your student affairs division put your plan into action. While we will not be able to address all of the steps in creating a strategic plan, we will offer specific ideas that will help you use the plan you may already have. Drawing on her experiences at a variety of institutions, our expert instructor will share examples of effective student affairs division strategic plans, budget templates, and assessment rubrics. Additionally, we will provide links to a variety of other resources (texts, webinars, membership organizations, and listservs), so you can continue to build your capacity around this topic after the webcast.

Living-Learning Programs for STEM Students

The initial development and ongoing management of a living-learning program for STEM students requires equal support and involvement from both the academic and residential sides of campus, which can be a challenge for many institutions. Join us online to learn how a carefully cultivated academic mission has enabled one institution’s STEM living-learning program to be successful for nearly 20 years. Highlighting their program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, our expert instructors will answer the following questions: How can residence life and academics partner to build a program? What are the key budgetary considerations? What are the main space needs for such a program? How can you market and recruit the right student residents? How can you assess the success of such an effort?

FERPA: When to Involve Legal Counsel
and Leadership

In working to meet the FERPA obligations of your campus, you’ll inevitably interact with board members, legal counsel, or other administrative leaders. Sometimes these leaders will call on you to release information or offer advice related to FERPA, and sometimes you must call on them in order to make a tough decision on FERPA. But managing these requests, and knowing when to ask for help, proves especially difficult when the stakes are high. Join us for this webcast to learn how to effectively manage FERPA requests from leaders while knowing when to ask legal counsel for assistance. You will leave with examples of FERPA situations you can resolve on your own and examples of situations in which you should always ask for help. Your purchase of this program includes access to the live webcast, as well as access to a website that houses a recording of the live webcast and other FERPA resources. You will be able to access the recordings and resources on the site through December 31, 2013 regardless of purchase date, so register now for this bundle! The sooner you register, the longer your access period will be. Beginning October 16, 2013, we will no longer offer […]

Recruiting and Retaining a Talented Advancement Team

Exceptionally high turnover within a development team can lead to impaired donor relations and can jeopardize future donations.  While nearly every shop recognizes the importance of recruiting and retaining talented development professionals, few have an intentional strategy to ensure they are recruiting the right development officers for their team and providing professional development opportunities and other incentives to ensure top performers stay and progress within their organization. Join us for a session that will highlight best practices that support longer advancement team tenures within an organization. Our expert instructor will share information and advice about the following: Preparing to recruit talented development professionals Using search firms, dedicated human resources staff, and in-house recruiter models Building retention into the interview and hiring process Developing sound hiring criteria and an effective hiring rubric Promoting from within/growing your own Incentivizing employees when budgets are tight Developing performance reviews that support your culture

Instructional Strategies for Blended Learning

Instructional strategies that have evolved in classrooms and lecture halls typically have minimal success in blended instruction. To teach well in the blended environment, instructors need to explore new pedagogical options and craft learning activities that fit the medium. Join us online to learn key strategies for teaching successfully in blended courses and effective practices for engaging your students. Our expert instructor will share examples of courses that demonstrate effective student engagement and sound instructional practices in a blended format.

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