Four Tips for Training Annual Fund Phonathon Callers

Despite how critical the phonathon can be to the annual fund, student callers are often given minimum training — or training that doesn’t set them up well to succeed in soliciting donor support for the institution. To learn some tips from past and present managers of highly effective phonathon programs, we turned this week to […]

Student Resilience: How One Institution is Helping At-Risk Freshmen Seize a Second Chance

If this article proves useful…You can take a deeper dive into this Middle Tennessee State University case study and a case study from Bay Path University in our recorded webcast. We’ve written a lot in past articles about the importance of resilience or “grit” to student persistence, and about what some offices on campus can […]

Spotlight on Innovation: How Bay Path University is Improving Accelerated Online Learning through a Social Learning Platform

Bay Path University is already breaking ground after establishing the only all-women’s fully online degree program, The American Women’s College Online (AWC), in the U.S. in 2014. The AWC offers over 20 degree programs, including business, criminal justice, cybersecurity, health services administration, leadership and organization, and psychology in an accelerated format. But Bay Path recognizes […]

Why Good is Still the Enemy of Great for Most Colleges and Universities

Series: Costs Down, Quality Up Historically, initiatives to improve quality have also meant added cost—smaller class sizes, more faculty who conduct research, etc.—but this is no longer a sustainable model for all institutions. What are the innovations that can actually drive the cost to educate a student lower while driving critical outcomes like student success and completion […]

Video: Trust and the High-Performing Team in Higher Education

Drawing on current research on high-performing leadership teams both within and outside of higher education, Pat Sanaghan, president of The Sanaghan Group and author of Collaborative Leadership in Action (2011) and the forthcoming book, How to Actually Build an Exceptional Team (2013), has identified 10 differentiators of exceptional teams, 10 qualities that enable teams to rise […]

2 Checklists: Selecting the Right LMS

In last week’s 7 Second Survey, Academic Impressions asked academics to comment on their learning management system (LMS). 184 academics responded. What they told us: We asked Thomas Cavanagh, associate vice president of distributed learning at the University of Central Florida, to comment on the findings. Cavanagh and his team recently underwent an LMS review […]

5 Tips for Improving International Alumni Data

Today, international alumni relations looks and feels: Successful programs require leadership support, designated staff management, volunteer engagement and resources such as budgets and updated data. With current databases, our efforts are only as good as the information we have — or the information we are getting today. How are we tracking international alumni? Does this […]

Why Are Our Academic Advisors Disengaged or Burned Out? And What Can We Do About It?

Without ongoing support and development, advisors may become disengaged. Here is how you can evaluate, energize, and engage experienced academic advisors. There are many resources devoted to the training and development of new advisors. However, once advisors are “up and running,” it is easy to leave them on their own and assume that they are […]

In Busy Higher Ed, 3 Ways to Foster Our Own Learning

We work at institutions of higher learning, but are we doing enough to foster our own learning? RELATED RESOURCES:10 Tips for Optimizing the Return on Professional DevelopmentScorecard: How Do Higher-Ed Institutions Leverage Professional Development?Full Report: The State of Professional Development in Higher Education (February 2016) by Mickey Fitch, Academic Impressions As professionals within higher education, our […]

Encouraging the Success of Online Students

July 28, 2011. The past decade has seen a plethora of research studies attempting to document the impact of online learning on measures of academic success and student persistence. The studies often produce widely divergent results, in part because institutions vary dramatically in the level of support and preparation they offer to both students and faculty. […]