Tools for Reflecting on Professional Development
Make the most of your professional development opportunities by reflecting on the experience, what you learned, and potential next steps. We’ve gathered the following tools to get you started.
Archives: Courses
Tools for Training Advisors
Are you tasked with the training and developing of academic advisors at your institution? Leverage the tools in this suite to round out your training plan. We’ve included resources that span three categories: Foundational Information Job Aids, Tools, and Activities Resources for Faculty Advisors Check back periodically to see what’s new!
Collaborating with Campus Partners to Expand Volunteer Opportunities
Many shops struggle to be intentional when matching volunteers to the kind of opportunities they are most passionate about. Ensuring that your volunteers feel like they are making an impact is critical to fostering the continued relationship. Your shop can be more intentional and practical in your process of connecting volunteers to programs by: Collaborating with faculty and staff to identify volunteer opportunities on campus Surveying volunteers and faculty Developing clear job descriptions for volunteers Join us for this webcast and learn how to audit your current volunteer opportunities, partner across campus to locate various volunteer roles, and create meaningful matches that suit your volunteers and institution. You will gain practical knowledge and ideas to set in motion on your campus to maximize the impact of your volunteers and their efforts.
Uncovering Resilience in Students with Mental Health Concerns: A Case Study
In today’s higher education landscape, a growing number of students are struggling with decreasing resilience, which frequently harms their academic performance and collegiate experience. As this trend continues to prevail, there is a growing realization that student resilience must be discussed holistically, with special focus on mental health. Well-being and resilience should be considered as critical components of a student’s academic and vocational success. In response to this issue, a handful of institutions are leading the way in creating and implementing innovative programs that address the relationship between mental health and resilience—by helping students improve skills related to emotional fortitude, grit, and social support. Join us for this webcast to learn how UMass Amherst has developed a new evidence and strengths-based healthcare program to enhance students’ resilience skills and help them flourish even in the face of mental illness. Participants will learn both short and long-term ways to implement a similar program on their respective campuses.
Practical Data Governance in Higher Education
Agenda Establishing a Data Governance Framework at Your Institution Identifying drivers for data governance Identifying stakeholders Strategic direction vs. tactical & practical needs Avoiding common pitfalls Launching and Managing Data Governance Obtaining a data governance information system Establishing a culture of collaboration Crafting data definitions and other vital deliverables Collaborating effectively with vendors Resources Download the presentation slides (PDF) Download the additional resources (PDF) Download the leftover questions (PDF)
Developing a Scorecard to Prioritize Your Corporate Partners for Holistic Engagement
Corporate engagement staff generally do not have time and resources to develop a comprehensive and intentional strategy. Learn how to build a more effective approach that will help you rank and prioritize your partners to ultimately identify your best leads with the strongest viability. Join us for this webcast to learn how to develop a unique and innovative corporate partner scorecard and identify what characteristics and data you should be looking at. You will leave this training able to better support and bolster more holistic engagement strategies by: Strategies for determining the right size of your portfolio Quantifying and prioritizing prospects Engaging leadership and faculty in your planning efforts
Are You Looking for a New Way to Evaluate Your Projects?
Modified from a process used by the US military, the before-action and after-action review cycle described here provides a structure for project reviews focused on process-improvement. Download this job aid to get started with more purposeful project reviews today!
Reframing Student Activism as a Vehicle for Student Leadership Development
Student activism has always been an important vehicle for marginalized students to not only practice civic engagement but to also raise awareness of perceived social injustices related to their collegiate experience. Despite all the opportunities student activism presents, most institutions still carry a negative attitude or feel ill-prepared to engage with such initiatives. Instead of proactively guiding and mentoring students through the process, they often fall into the trap of waiting until students create a rumble. From the students’ perspective, there is often a lack of clarity on campus policies and resources that can provide guidance on how to raise concerns without completely disrupting the day-to-day campus routine. There lies an opportunity for campus leaders to teach students about intent vs. impact and about how civic engagement can help develop their leadership skills and potential. Join us and our seasoned speaker online to reframe activism from a threat or problem to an opportunity for student growth and leadership development.
Creating a Training Model to Increase Faculty Engagement in Students’ Mental Health
Faculty are on the frontline when it comes to student mental health, but many are not comfortable acting in or navigating this space. Instead of generically training your team with off-the-shelf materials, provide a more intentional and impactful way to integrate these key players in your mental health initiatives. This webcast, developed with David Reetz, Director of Rochester Institute of Technology’s Counseling Center, provides a faculty engagement training model that is faculty-centric and action-oriented. You’ll gain insights into the different components of this successful training model that you can immediately adapt and apply to your own unique institutional context. Prepare your faculty to minimize triggers and take action towards establishing a positive tone and an accepting climate for students with mental health concerns.
Engaging and Celebrating First-Generation Students and Faculty on Your Campus
Institutions often struggle to support first-gen students as many of them hide their status or are unaware that they may qualify as first-gen. By helping students to self-identify, your student support teams are better able to connect them with first-gen faculty, alumni, and other students. Hearing from others who have had similar experiences and learning how they coped and dealt with various difficult challenges can be the catalyst the first-gen student needs to feel valued and understood and to complete their degree successfully. Join us for this online training to learn how to support your first-gen students on your campus so they take pride in being the “first to go” in their family. This webcast is designed to give you a framework for supporting these students that will help you organize your efforts across numerous departments as a cohesive unit. During this webcast, you will learn how El Camino College and University of California, Los Angeles involved faculty and various departments on campus to improve the success of their first-gen students by creating online and in-person support programs and maintain the momentum of the programs.
Keys to Creating a Powerful Partnership Between Advising and Career Services at Your Institution
Institutions everywhere are looking for ways to integrate academic advising and career services functions into a coordinated or unified approach. Join us online to learn how Florida Atlantic University was able to cross-train their advising and career services teams to gain an understanding of each other’s knowledge base and ultimately build a more cohesive model. You will learn how to accomplish this difficult work on your own campus. Note: This training focuses on how your teams can build the right structures to enable effective interactions with students; it will not focus as much on specific interactions with students.
Training for Advancement: Assess Your Data Integrity and Establish Data Cleaning Priorities
Most of us struggle to collect accurate and relevant data from our alumni, but many of us have not evaluated our databases to create a holistic picture of our strengths and weaknesses. Even fewer shops have formalized processes in place to regularly assess the efficiency and quality of different data channels. Join us for this interactive webinar to learn a comprehensive approach to assessing your data integrity. Our faculty will dive deep into the criteria of data quality and provide you with strategies and practices to keep your data clean.
Strategies to Engage Faculty in Research Growth
An increasing number of universities are under pressure to boost their research activity to gain more prestige, foster greater learning opportunities, and better contribute to economic development and innovation. However, breaking into such a competitive space requires interest from faculty, which can be a challenging due to their heavy teaching loads or lack of understanding of how research can benefit their institutions. A key vehicle in engaging faculty with research growth is communication. In order to gain trust, it’s crucial to use techniques that promote transparency and effectively justify the value of growing research. Join us online to hear our experienced speaker, Dr. Sangita Pawar, discuss how to cultivate faculty’s engagement in advancing research through transparent communication strategies. Sangita will share her experiences and best practices in getting faculty on board with research initiatives that she attained from her past roles as faculty and administrator. This webcast will benefit teaching universities as well as institutions with lower research activity who would like to increase their presence in the research space.
Growing Research Collaboration Through External University Partnerships
Today, there is increasing pressure on institutions to engage in research, garner more funding, and contribute to innovation and economic development. For those trying to take their research activity off the ground, establishing an external university partnership can be just the right strategic step to boost growth and enhance the visibility of their institution’s research initiatives. In addition to improving the student experience, research partnerships can also allow universities to be leaders as well as collaborators in their own areas of expertise. Join us and our experienced speaker, Dr. Geoff Payne, for this online training where we will discuss the various types of external partnerships and how you can build them successfully from the ground up. Dr. Payne will also present some case studies, both local and international, and the lessons learnt from each.
Strategies to Prepare for Title IX Litigation of Faculty or Staff Respondent Cases
Agenda Using the resource you’ll receive as part of your registration, we will cover the following four areas and provide you with information to consider at each juncture, pitfalls to avoid, and specific examples, where applicable. Recognize and Differentiate the Possible Role of Critical Partnering Offices and Staff Translate and Define the Title IX Coordinator’s Legal Rights and Obligations Assemble and Preserve Documentation and Evidence Identify and Explain Steps During the ​Civil Litigation Process
An Innovative Approach: Distributed Content Strategy in Higher Ed Marketing
Join us for a webcast that will introduce you to the concept of distributed content strategy, an innovative way of thinking about organizing and publishing your content in higher ed marketing and communications. You will leave the webcast with a better understanding of: What a distributed content strategy approach looks like and why it’s important in higher ed marketing today How to create compelling content that is platform-specific How you can incorporate distributed content into your own strategies, even if you work in a resource-lean or highly decentralized environment To help illustrate what the results of a distributed content strategy can be, you will see numerous examples from our expert instructor’s own work across the web, in email, and on social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. What is distributed content strategy? Distributed content strategy is an approach that prioritizes building content and audiences specifically on external or rented platforms, rather than solely directing traffic back to an organization’s website. By conceiving of and creating content that is native to the channel at hand (for instance, Twitter cards, Instagram stories, etc.), institutions can communicate with their audiences more directly and with greater effectiveness, depending on which channels they […]
Four Strategies for Successfully Advising Undeclared Students
Gain strategies and tactics to help you be more intentional in your advising support of undeclared students. Haley Richards from Colorado State University will share how her institution helped undeclared students outpace the average first year GPA, and she will teach you how to incorporate a similar plan of action on your campus. Whether you come from a large or small institution, these strategies can be applied to your unique institutional context.
Developing an In-Depth Alumni Mentoring Program
Mentoring programs are a great way to reconnect and re-engage alumni, while providing students important career development advice and helping them to understand life after school. Join us online as we uncover the tools and techniques needed to create a program that effectively engages alumni as volunteer mentors and provides meaningful experiences for students. You will learn how to establish, maintain, and assess an effective alumni mentoring program that values the depth of the connection over the number of transactions; you will also gain strategies for how to engage and secure faculty and campus partners as key stakeholders. This webcast will showcase the success of Marquette University’s award-winning program that has seen: 100% satisfaction from students and alumni 93% of mentors and mentees complete their established goals 90% of mentors return annually to the program, with many referring fellow alumni as future program participants
3 Ways to Connect Students to Career Services Early and Often
The schools that are the most successful in helping their students develop professionally are those that engage them early and often. In this webcast, you will learn about three initiatives that Loyola Marymount University has successfully employed to better serve their students: industry-specific networking events, summer engagement, and off-campus career treks. You will leave with practical advice on how to launch these initiatives at your own institution.
Tuition: Raise it, Lower it, or Stay the Course?
Join us for a webcast that will help you navigate the intricacies of tuition setting for undergraduate students in today’s unpredictable market. Those who are looking to educate their board and institutional stakeholders further on this topic, or who are in the midst of considering a tuition adjustment, will benefit from this webcast. We will help you answer the following difficult questions: What are the tuition pricing models and strategies available to me? What are the risks and implications associated with each versus doing nothing? How can I avoid a “one size fits all” approach and plan for the fact that a tuition adjustment will impact various student segments differently? How can I educate/work with the board and other important stakeholders to make them effective partners?