Evaluating the Strengths and Weaknesses of Your Team

After assembling a team of intelligent and motivated individuals at your institution, you might be wondering how to evaluate their effectiveness. After all, even the strongest and most productive teams can benefit from understanding where they are excelling and where they could use some additional work. We want to make that task easier for your by helping you informally review the strengths and weaknesses of your team. The following 5 lessons will review some best practices around team building.

Making the Business Case for Active Learning Spaces

Whether you’re justifying use of funds or seeking funding for your active learning space initiative, your project scope will need evidence to support your request. Our experts will guide you through ways to collect and incorporate the most compelling data so you can effectively communicate the need and what it will cost. Join us for this 60 minute webcast and learn essential front-end research strategies that you can use and apply during the vision, design, and budgeting phases.

Creating Support Structures to Help Grads Develop a Professional Identity

Graduate students, unlike their undergrad counterparts, often do not have dedicated student support systems. However, not all graduate students want to pursue a career in academia and many need avenues for seeking career options, gaining professional skills, and preparing for life after higher education. During this training, you will learn how Virginia Commonwealth University was able to provide support in four critical areas to help grads make the transition from student to professional, including: Interviewing skills Understanding professional culture Knowing your options for careers Dealing with anxiety through the transition For each of these topics, we will discuss what sub-topics were included, how the support was staffed and resourced, the format the support was given in, and a suggested timeline for when the support was given. You will leave with plenty of ideas for how to replicate similar support for your graduate students.

Decision-Making Possibilities with Activity-Based Costing

What does it cost to offer a course, a service, or an entire degree to students? Understanding the true cost of what your institution offers through Activity-Based Costing (ABC) gives you real numbers to work with and allows you to make better decisions in the short and long-term. During this webcast you will hear about the decisions that New York Institute of Technology was able to make both before and after implementing ABC, and we will help you to connect what they were able to do to your own institution. You will gain an understanding of how the ABC model works and how you can use it to support decisions in: Capital planning Academic program review Strategic enrollment management

Create Inspiring Campaign Communications

Do your campaign communications need to be updated? Whether you are looking for communications advice regarding an upcoming campaign or simply looking for new ideas to refresh your current campaign, this webcast will help you generate aesthetically inspiring and donor-centric campaign communications. During this event, you will see several examples of communication pieces used throughout campaigns at several institutions.

Using Experiential Learning to Link Classroom Content to Real Life Situations

Experiential learning is a hot topic right now in higher ed, but few institutions have managed to integrate it meaningfully into their curriculum on a larger scale. Join us for a webcast to learn about how North Park University institutionalized experiential learning into its undergraduate curriculum through a full-scale redesign.  Every Wednesday, classrooms at North Park close in favor of on-the-ground learning with businesses, cultural institutions, and community leaders in the city of Chicago. During the webcast, you will walk through the questions and answers that allowed the University to incorporate experiential learning on an ongoing basis, including: What was the budget for this project? How do you restructure class schedules to accommodate experiential learning? How does the University arrange and coordinate site visits? How do you transport students? How do you assess learning and overall impact of the experiential lessons?

Ideas for Academic Leaders to Engage Faculty in Student Recruitment

Faculty members can passionately discuss an academic program better than nearly anyone on campus; as such, they make ideal partners in student recruitment. While many faculty are reluctant to grow their recruitment responsibilities, academic leaders are finding themselves in the best position to help bolster faculty support. During this training, we will help academic leaders fine-tune their vision and expectations for getting faculty more involved in student recruitment. We will provide tools to ensure that you understand what is currently needed in student recruitment, as well as discuss the current admissions landscape. You will leave with a better understanding of how you, as an academic leader, can: Build a culture of engagement in admissions success Identify and train the best faculty partners Balance faculty recruitment work with their other responsibilities   Create incentives and rewards for faculty participation in recruitment

Civil Dialogue as a Classroom Management Strategy

Learn about practical tools that you can use to engage students in a civil discussion about controversial topics. During this interactive webcast we will discuss your role in facilitating meaningful conversations and have the opportunity to practice two communication frameworks, including: Open The Front Door (OTFD) to communication The A.C.T.I.O.N framework

Transfer Student Success: Cultivating Partnerships Between 2- and 4-Year Institutions

Amid declining enrollment from first-year, traditional students, many institutions are leveraging different types of partnerships and pathways between 2-year and 4-year institutions as an important way to ensure a strong transfer enrollment pipeline. Join us online to gain insights into one such partnership that exists between Loyola Marymount University and El Camino College. Representatives from each school will share how they have nurtured this partnership throughout the years and will provide strategies on how to successfully cultivate comprehensive and sustainable partnerships and pathways between 2- and 4-year institutions.

Enhance Your Application Process: Strategies to Measure Grit and Non-Cognitive Variables

Many application processes do not assess for persistence and grit, yet these qualities are often a better predictor of success than academic ability. Traditional admissions processes that focus solely on academics put some students at a disadvantage – especially first-generation or low-income students. Incorporating the right questions into your application processes will help you better predict success for students who might not meet traditional requirements. Join us online to learn how to enhance your own admissions processes.  This webcast will provide strategies and tools to help you assess non-cognitive variables by rethinking: The questions you ask in applications How you phrase essay prompts The reviewal process of extra-curricular activities and recommendations