Search Results for: meeting

What’s Keeping Deans Up at Night: A Free Webcast for Academic Leaders

FREE WEBCAST What’s Keeping Deans Up at Night: A Free Webcast for Academic Leaders Recorded on: June 8, 2022 Learn the pressing issues that are on the minds of Deans—as well as their most common hopes and plans for moving forward. Out of all of the academic leaders in higher education, Deans are arguably the ones who are closest to the challenges and potential solutions of higher ed. Some of the most pressing challenges keeping deans up at night include: changing student demographics and the impending demographic cliff, how to ensure academic rigor and accessibility, faculty and staff morale and equity, and waning funding from traditional revenue sources. Join us for this free webcast to hear from two deans representing, respectively, a public, land-grant research institution as well as a small, private liberal arts college as they share their perspectives on what is keeping them up at night—as well as the practices they hope will enable their colleges and institutions to be successful in a more equitable and agile higher-ed landscape. Our speakers will discuss and invite peer insights on such topics as: Maintaining a vibrant campus culture—and how that challenge has changed in light of the pandemic. Recruiting and […]

Build the Capacity of Your Institution’s Leaders

FREE RECORDED WEBCAST Build the Capacity of Your Institution’s Leaders As higher education faces a time of crisis, we need leaders at every level of the institution who can grow and think differently about the future. We need answers to questions like these: How do you identify potential leaders? What kind of support and resources should you be providing to your people? How can leaders best develop the capacity of their entire organization? What actually works in terms of creating more effective leaders? Our colleges and universities don’t traditionally have a culture of systematically developing their people. In this free webcast recording, we’ll share what some colleges and universities are trying, what’s working, and what isn’t.     Who Should Watch This free recorded webcast will offer new ideas and approaches to: Heads of human resources and organizational development Directors of leadership academies and leadership development programs Senior academic and administrative leaders who want to invest more in the success and growth of their people Before accessing this free webcast…Please sign up first for future updates from Academic Impressions. Notice: JavaScript is required for this content. Agenda Drawing on our experience working with 2,000 universities each year—and on our recent […]

Persistent Tension in Academic Leadership and How to Make it Productive

Posted on by bradystanton@ai_azuread

Leadership is hard Let’s face it, leadership is hard and exhausting. Leadership was hard before the Covid-19 pandemic, and the additional complexities that leaders have been facing over the past year have been significant. Leaders at all levels are increasingly finding themselves making more decisions more quickly, with more significance, and with less information. The risks we are managing have increased. Our teams are looking to us for vision and guidance while we manage all of this new complexity and challenge. And we are doing all of this while working at our kitchen tables and in virtual meetings. We have had to acquire a whole new set of skills to lead in a remote or hybrid environment literally overnight. Leading teams and managing ourselves during these conditions is not for the faint hearted and it necessitates that we build our toolkit to tackle leadership in new ways. Now we are starting to look to the future with hope and optimism, knowing that some things will never return to the way they were before the pandemic. They can’t, and in many ways, they shouldn’t. Acknowledging and validating that the work of leading is hard right now (and really always was) is […]

This is How We Need to Rethink the Work of Student Affairs

Posted on by 25337pwpadmin@ai_azuread

by Daniel Fusch and Caleb Tegtmeier (Academic Impressions) The challenges facing our students and our institutions are more complex than in the past, and no single, siloed office can address these challenges adequately. That’s why some institutions have been forming student affairs innovation hubs to bring together a more diverse crew of creative minds from across campus and put them to work on improving the student experience. One of these institutions is Seattle University, and we recently interviewed Seattle U’s vice president for student development, Michele C. Murray, Ph.D., and Seattle U’s assistant vice president for student development, Monica Nixon, Ed.D. Rethinking Our Work Murray and Nixon suggest that the one-stop shop approach to serving specific student demographics (such as transfer students, for instance) has several flaws. When Seattle University set up an office to serve its transfer students, Murray notes, “the great thing was that we had one full-time staff person completely committed to those transfer students. The downside was that the transfer students felt siloed. They weren’t introduced to the fullness of the student experience, and that issue was replicated across multiple student populations.” “Another unintended consequence of the siloed way of using one-stop shop areas to serve specific […]

Access and Prestige: The Complex Function of Financial Aid in Higher Education

Posted on by bradystanton@ai_azuread

In my last post, I wrote about how admissions works, although the lesson, perhaps, is that the term “admissions office” means very different things at different institutions. And while it’s still true that we in admissions and enrollment management all agree on one thing—that if a student never applies, they won’t enroll—it’s also true that the final step in the process is the processing and delivery of financial aid. A caveat: This is hard to grasp on the first pass—if it sometimes does not seem to make sense, that just means you probably understand it better than you think you do. I recommend paper, a pencil, and some note-taking to get you through this. It’s going to be challenging to navigate. About 15 years ago, I started gauging the age of my audience during presentations by putting an image on the screen. It’s the floorboard of an automobile, showing part of the brake and floormat for some context. You’re likely to notice the bright red carpet before you notice something else that doesn’t look quite right: To the left of the brake is a silver button, a little bigger than a quarter. I ask the audience members to raise their […]

7 Ways Advisors Can More Effectively Engage Online Students

Posted on by 25337pwpadmin@ai_azuread

Online students are at significant risk for attrition as they experience isolation and a sense of disconnect from the institution, as well as find themselves lacking resources and information. Advisors can greatly impact students’ perceptions of their online experience by providing ongoing support and information to students. Advising online students can be challenging, however, as academic advisors are responsible for providing quality advising to students they may never meet, relying on phone and electronic communication as an alternative to face-to-face advising. Advisors who have traditionally worked with students in a face-to-face environment may experience frustration, dissatisfaction, and a lack of connection with the students with whom they work. Advisors run the risk of eliminating critical, comprehensive developmental advising strategies as they attempt to manage a seemingly unmanageable amount of emails and phone calls. It’s important for advisors to remember that online is not a type of student, rather, it is a mode of delivery for academic coursework. Students study online for a variety of reasons, including geographical limitations, learning style, work, and personal commitments. The needs of these students are no different from those of any other students, although students in an online environment often perceive a sense of isolation, […]

Survey Report: Where Your Institution May be Missing Opportunities to Improve Academic Advising

Posted on by 25337pwpadmin@ai_azuread

In November 2011, Academic Impressions surveyed colleges and universities on their practices in assessing academic advisors. 73 institutions responded, and of those who responded, 57 percent employ both faculty and professional advisors, 24 percent use only faculty advisors, and 19 percent use only professional advisors. The aggregated results from the survey reveal some significant issues. When asked what methods they were using to assess the effectiveness of academic advising, respondents indicated: Note that 21 percent – over one fifth – of respondents have no system in place for assessing advising. And though 63 percent are collecting student evaluations, a far smaller percentage are using the data they collect to provide training or other concrete efforts to improve the quality of academic advising: Most institutions are collecting some evaluative data, but few institutions are using that data to improve advising programs and practices. In fact, 61% of institutions surveyed do not use assessment data to reward and recognize effective advising, and nearly half do not use it to inform training for academic or faculty advisors. Lisa Wexler, conference director with Academic Impressions, notes that this disparity in results suggests that what data is being collected is likely not being used to […]

This is How We Need to Rethink the Work of Student Affairs

Posted on by Daniel Fusch

The challenges facing our students and our institutions are more complex than in the past, and no single, siloed office can address these challenges adequately. That’s why some institutions have been forming student affairs innovation hubs to bring together a more diverse crew of creative minds from across campus and put them to work on improving the student experience. One of these institutions is Seattle University, and we recently interviewed Seattle U’s vice president for student development, Michele C. Murray, Ph.D., and Seattle U’s assistant vice president for student development, Monica Nixon, Ed.D. Rethinking Our Work Murray and Nixon suggest that the one-stop shop approach to serving specific student demographics (such as transfer students, for instance) has several flaws. When Seattle University set up an office to serve its transfer students, Murray notes, “the great thing was that we had one full-time staff person completely committed to those transfer students. The downside was that the transfer students felt siloed. They weren’t introduced to the fullness of the student experience, and that issue was replicated across multiple student populations.” “Another unintended consequence of the siloed way of using one-stop shop areas to serve specific student demographics — is that the students feel […]

Advancement/Academic Partnerships: Using a Team Science Model to Fund Research

Posted on by 25337pwpadmin@ai_azuread

A SERIES ON INNOVATIONS IN FUNDING ACADEMIC RESEARCH Ed Mason, president of EMNR & Associates, is writing this series to assist academic leaders in finding creative strategies to merge public/private funding for existing and new research initiatives. Mason has studied an array of collaborative partnerships between the two offices most focused on external funding (the development office and research & grants), and he will be sharing some of the models he has observed, as well as directions for the future. We hope you will join us for this innovative series: In the traditional model for funding academic research at universities, multiple offices and departments interact with faculty in the administration of grants and gifts from external donors. Commonly, these offices do not interact frequently or communicate effectively with each other, which tends to create a “silo” effect. By moving instead to a team science model for defining and funding research initiatives, you will: What is Team Science, and What Does it Mean to Researchers and Development Officers? Team science is a proven model that creates partnerships between researchers, advancement professionals, and other key stakeholders at your institution. It involves developing strong collaborative teams who will be able to compete and successfully procure funding for high-priority research […]