WHERE THIS ARTICLE BEGAN… Ashlyn Sowell was a faculty member at AI’s conference on Strengthening, Strategy and Growing Engagement for Alumni Boards. This article was sparked by conversation among schools at the event who were considering the next steps for adding a board or council to their young alumni programs. Some critical questions were raised; here, we start to answer them. Should You Start a Young Alumni Council? The Answer is Maybe Volunteer groups can be a great asset, but do require cultivation and meaningful work to engage with your institution. Here we will talk more about how Gettysburg College made its decision and what the outcome has been. Gettysburg College has a strong history with its alumni board, dating back many years. Around 2008, alumni relations staff began thinking about ways to engage young alumni who made up a large percentage of the overall alumni population and had unique ways that they wanted to interact with their alma mater. As such, a proposal was made to the Board of Trustees, and we created the BOLD Council (Burgians of the Last Decade), a young alumni council of 25 members. The council’s strategies include ways to engage alumni through communications, interaction […]
A NEW SERIES This is the first in a series of articles from Ken Smith, Virginia Tech’s vice provost for resource management and institutional effectiveness. Smith has both chaired and staffed multiple committees charged with overall improvement of special sessions operations at Virginia Tech. He holds a PhD in Educational Leadership from Virginia Tech. You may also be interested in Smith’s recent podcast, “Approaching the Academic Calendar More Creatively.” More colleges are considering offering special sessions outside the traditional academic calendar. In some cases, institutions are moving beyond summer and winter inter-sessions to provide condensed terms in May (immediately following spring term) or August (immediately preceding fall term). There are even “spring break” sessions that offer opportunity for very compressed but innovative courses. Special sessions not only provide the institution with financial gains by generating additional tuition revenues; they also offer opportunities to improve student success, completion rates, and job readiness. For example: For faculty, special sessions can offer not only extra pay but also an opportunity to try out innovative approaches to teaching a course. Because of the shorter time frame, many special session courses are delivered with a mix of on-line and in person instruction. Certain types of […]
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 […]
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Dr. Carol Anne Constabile-Heming, Professor of German, University of North Texas. Because of the isolation that resulted from the emergency shut down of colleges and universities as a response to the spread of COVID-19 in the spring semester, the sense of community that ordinarily germinates organically on college and university campuses all but vanished. This, coupled with disruption to the operations of scholarly organizations that normally host annual conferences and professional development opportunities, has acted as a barrier to scholarly productivity for many faculty members. This is especially true in the case of women and minoritized faculty who are shouldering the majority of caregiver duties, including caring for sick family members, supervising home schooling, shopping, cleaning, and cooking. In the midst of the often-impossible demands this places on one’s time, energy and focus, scholarly activity—most especially writing—can easily fall to the bottom of the incredibly long task list. Faced with my own uncertainties and concerns about moving my research projects forward, I longed for a way to recreate the serenity of summer. Summer break, for me, typically involves travel to archives in Germany, where I spend a minimum of four weeks concentrated on writing. I knew I was going to […]
At Academic Impressions, we have offered a number of articles and other resources on peer mentoring, and our readers and participants at our events have asked, “Is peer mentoring effective in a niche academic program — such as nursing or aviation — or at a niche institution?” We forwarded this question to a panel of experts on peer mentor programs. This article provides their answers. Included on the panel: Should Niche Programs/Institutions Consider Peer Mentoring? Margie Bader: Students coming into niche institutions or programs have no prior experience to draw on to help them cope with this very new material and practicum. Niche programs are rich in specialized content, which makes them stressful and overwhelming to some students. Mentors can help simplify the process, give tips on how to handle the material, the evaluation process and the needs of the professors. Mentors can also help to give a big picture view of where the students are headed as well as details of how to manage the program in the upcoming semesters. Niche programs also often have a practical component or an internship. Mentors who have successfully completed this part of the program can give valuable tips on how to find […]
READ THE FULL SERIES Earlier this year, we conducted a study of how institutions are planning for the design and placement of student life facilities over the next 12 months. Our study included: We want to take this moment to share our findings with you. They’re intriguing: Finding 1: Student Life Facilities are Being Planned in Tandem We were fascinated to learn that institutions are now thinking about core student facilities in conjunction with one another in ways that we haven’t seen in the past. These are no longer isolated projects. In fact, 40% of institutions are planning all of these facilities in the next two years, and 50% are planning more than one. FROM OUR INTERVIEWS “Recreational facilities, residence halls, the student center: we used to think about these facilities independently, but student needs have forced us to think about them collectively. How can we think creatively about maximizing finite space in conjunction with student improvement goals? How can we create spaces for spontaneous student interaction and organic student programming?”Respondent from a small women’s college in the West Finding 2: Institutions are Continuing to Push for More Intentionality in Design and Placement The survey validated that the push for a […]
The silo mentality that often exists on our campuses often limits our collective actions, and creates redundancy and replication. Given shrinking resources and the rapid pace of change, the siloed approach to team building and decision making is neither strategic nor feasible. We must work collaboratively to utilize the collective talents of our campus stakeholders. And learning to build high performing teams is one of the most effective ways we can meet the many challenges that confront us. If a senior leader can build a stellar team, the organizational leverage that can be achieved is powerful and can be a game changer for a campus. In this scenario: Stakeholders understand that cross-boundary collaboration is expected and supported by the actions of the senior team, because they model the way. Campuses are able to solve complex challenges because people work together to manage these challenges. People share resources, ideas, attention and effort, recognizing that the team, not just some individuals on it, really matter in serving the mission and vision of their campus. We have had the opportunity to work with scores of senior teams in higher education. Almost always, these teams were comprised of highly intelligent, dedicated, honest, and mission-driven individuals. But […]
MORE FROM RIT RIT’s strategic plan calls for the institution to become a “model of inclusive excellence for all faculty and staff in the areas of professional development.” Here are further examples of what RIT has been trying recently: Beyond Workshops: How RIT Incentivizes Faculty Development “George”: How RIT is Encouraging Interdisciplinary Collaboration When thinking about a student issue or working on a syllabus, faculty members often seek the advice of a colleague — usually by just walking to the office next door. For adjunct faculty, however, the colleague next door has often left for the day and administration offices may also be shut. Adjunct faculty often operate largely on their own, and have a difficult time meeting colleagues who can provide feedback and support. When institutions deliberately build adjunct communities, this allows the faculty to support each other, helps make adjunct faculty feel appreciated and rewarded, and improves adjunct teaching and student success in the classroom. The Rochester Institute of Technology is working to build an adjunct community to foster the kinds of relationships that many full-time faculty and staff take for granted. We talked with Anne Marie Canale and Cheryl Herdklotz, Faculty Career Development Consultants, to learn more about the […]
Introduction Like a great many other institutions, we emerged from the pandemic knowing that the disruptions of the last few years would inevitably lead to changes in the preferences and desires of our student population around the educational model and how education gets delivered. We also knew that, to remain successful and competitive as an undergraduate program of ~2,900 students in a typical college of business at a large, public land-grant institution, we needed to keep in close touch with how those preferences were evolving. This article serves to tell that story: how we went about understanding our students’ changing attitudes about the educational model, what the data pointed to, and what changes we made in response. Students now clearly prefer to have online classes in all areas of their curricula, and they prefer asynchronous offerings over synchronous – a large change from what our data was telling us just one year ago. We hope that by telling this story, we urge and inspire other units to do the same: not only is it important to continually monitor and adjust to best meet your constituents’ needs, but those who are willing to adapt quickly have a distinct opportunity to take […]
