Academic Administrators

Sunday, June 24, 2001

Facilitator: Terry Moran,

Recorder: Kathy Goettsch

Assignment: Identify major problems or issues to address, identify strategies to share or create for building a learning college culture in the institution, evaluate how we are doing as facilitators of learning in the role of academic administrators, and discuss how the role needs to change to better lead and contribute to the college’s journey to becoming more learning centered.

Major Issues/Strategies for Building a Learning College

Technical Literacy

· Establish basic technical literacy for entering students and the major issue whole-information literacy for students as a final outcome

· Accountability--how technology will improve learning

· Not just qualitative, also quantitative providing ability to serve more students

· Continuum of e-learning with syllabus information, courses and opportunities to communicate by e-mail or chat rooms

· Issue of convenience for urban campuses – parking, child care, space on campus

· Getting faculty to see different kinds of use whether PowerPoint, web, etc.

§ Technical literacy embedded in different courses, e.g. in English evaluate Internet sources, how to do research in a Psychology course, so every general education course demonstrated a technical piece for the whole student

§ Students can choose best option for them.

· Constant evolution on what you are assessing with future generations

· Critical skills across the curriculum with defining competency statements. Has to be attended to over time.

· Consortium for mainframe operations

· Use technology to promote learning communities and collaboration

Student Engagement

· Front door issues

§ orientation

§ assessment

§ resources allocated toward that effort

Faculty and Staff Development

· Identify behavior and assessment criteria for recruiting faculty and staff

· Develop measures of the criteria

Campus culture

· difference between campus and student perspective and culture

Time for faculty for assessment role

· Release time

· Redesign workloads

· Compensation

Need for architecture change to change assessment/learning culture

· Change structure, way we operate

· Get to the grass roots level

How to help faculty understand benefits of change

· Demonstrate importance and understand how it benefits their students

· Evaluation based on this so it is explicit part of the expectation and only risk is not doing it

· Assessment is gathering information to improve, not evaluate. Language is important.

· Require of new faculty before moving them to tenure status

Engaging all parts of the college community in the learning college

· Best practices:

§ Mailing each semester with staff responses in campus newsletter

§ Rotate Vanguard team membership

§ Match Vanguard goals with strategic planning; transparent, part of institution priorities

§ Help faculty focus because students want it based on input from survey

§ Teaching Circles sessions with Vanguard team members for all faculty and support staff

§ Faculty participated in objective teams leaving with commitment for themselves to advance particular goals

§ Brought in consultant and developed teaching and learning teams to permeate all areas of responsibility throughout the campus

¨ Sought input on what support is needed

¨ Information shared with faculty at large

§ Assessment RFP’s at levels one through four with extra support for levels three and four to provide models for other faculty to follow.

§ Monthly faculty meetings on what works and what does not

· Provide needed support (most important question people have with any change)

· Creative and varied approaches

Changing Roles in Building a Learning College

· Provide information and things needed to think differently (Green Thumb Myth, book on adult learning)

· Be expedient. Go to meetings knowing what needs to be done. Be ready to act. Have to get past the talking.

· Provide evidence students have learned and make decisions based on that.

· Know your students, their needs, strengths, variety. Make decisions based on that. Budget tells how much we care about the issues discussed here.

· Push teachers to use alternatives. Can’t just lecture.

Academic Administrators

Monday, June 25, 2001

Facilitator: Terry Moran

Recorder: Kathy Goettsch

Best Practices:

· Baltimore-devote $5,000.00 per year for continuous improvement projects starting at course level, now moving to learning patterns for all career program.

· Denver-capstone courses and guarantees to employers.

· Kirkwood shared student and staff satisfaction surveys and is seeking information to assess the level of services in the college and compare benchmarking. (Kirkwood is shifting the student survey to the new one developed by Kay McClenney.) On the student survey, found in every case that student’s gap between incoming ability was larger as they went further into their program. Computer skills was an area with largest perceived growth and there is no requirement in that area. Significant changes in the staff survey results were with Instructional Technology as a result of staff changes and an approach to becoming a true service organization. Goals stem from the results. Results are posted on the Intranet. Publish some of the student results in the student newspaper. Survey shows which departments rate an area low so you can find out where the difficulties are.

How is assessment of outcomes organized in the institution?

· student services

· instruction

· director of institutional effectiveness and grants

· across the campus: student services accuplacer, academic dean cut-off scores; outcomes assessment process in academic area with a lot of support from institutional research area Level of 80 institutional indicators with half state-level indicators (first-time, full-time, GPA). How they do when they transfer to a university is filtered back. In the process now of benchmarking those indicators. Chancellor-level decision this would be institution goal for the next two years to close achievement gap between minorities.

Are you able to set institutional priorities and have resources behind them?

· By law, the county has control of budget with line item veto. Also build budget around strategic plan. Hope to get additional from county to put new strategic initiatives. Have $100,000.00 toward assessment outcomes.

· Have $130,000 in innovation fund they can apply to.

· Not being able to carry over Continuing Ed income is big impediment.

· Strategic plan helps.

· $400,000 every year to strategic initiatives. Team monitors. Has to fall into category of one of the strategic initiatives. Each has action-planning sheet, steps to be taken, responsible person, and feedback mechanisms.

· Lane has plan, zero dollars.

· No new dollars. Must have initiatives. Do a lot of release time for programs and projects integral to moving forward. Use remaining adjunct budget. New dollars from increased enrollment but are not realized until two years hence. All face increased utility and gas costs.

Review of current tuition

· Ranges from $11 to $68 at Baltimore, which is within $2.00 of the mean across the state, to $78 at Kirkwood, which will now generate 50% of their income; Lane is at $36 with reimbursement of $2200/FTE by the state.

Assessment activities

· If you are going to do assessment, will have to pay for it. Underestimated technical expertise it requires and training for faculty. Generating data for the college is not something faculty see as central role.

· Our job is to figure out how to track and assess. Bridge program. Skill levels were low in health careers so a tutorial was inserted resulting in 23% change in student ability to get in program. Faculty release time. Can work with research office to figure out what we learn from this. Need data from one to feed into the other.

· Executive dashboards, pick 8-10 data points throughout the year: FTE, budget expense, number of students per section, cost per FTE, percent taught by adjunct, etc to determine if there things to monitor throughout the year to make changes within the year. Better job of managing enterprise by monitoring data throughout the year.

· Use institutional data to develop program accountability system (PAS), built off standards of Illinois College Board. Includes number of students by course/section/program, cost, plus/minus over a five-year period. Some programs are high cost with Ph.D. faculty and expensive equipment. Data collected over four years to cancel a program. Won Illinois Community College of the Year Award to introduce that. Will share this information.