Category: Higher Education

College and University teaching trends

Community, Higher Education, Resilience

A Plan of Action

ProvostMissy@WCSU

We are going to have a retreat. Yes, that is the next step for WCSU, a retreat to help us sort through what we are doing now and determine opportunities for a better future. As I made the announcement, I could hear both the collective groan and the impatient calls for a concrete strategy for improvement. We have had retreats before, and strategic plans, and discussions about curriculum, or advising, or even branding, but we keep ending up in the same place. That same place is characterized by small, isolated moves that do not transform the whole. We need to transform the whole.

I understand the collective sigh about the notion of a retreat. From the perspective of the campus community the retreats are not leading to action. That is not quite true. There has been action attached to both the Strategic Plan and the Budget Retreat that occurred just before the pandemic. For my own sanity, I must list a few of those actions.

Goal one of the Strategic Plan asked us to grow our support for a diverse community of learners. To that end we’ve solidified the FY program, added a peer mentor program, and transformed our Education Access Program. These moves positively impacted our graduation rates (pre-COVID) and showed signs of supporting better retention. We hope to see a larger impact now that we are fully operational again.

The other component of that diverse community of learners was a focus on adults. We have done a lot around graduate programs and most recently received approval from our accreditor to expand our online offerings. This will strengthen the opportunities we have available for returning undergraduates. We plan to launch options for that group in the fall.

Goal two asked us to focus on our processes and services for a diverse community of learners. COVID-19 helped us accelerate this work tremendously. Students can now access most services remotely, thus allowing them to get support at the time they need it, instead of between 8:00-4:30. Digital forms & signatures, remote access to advising, tutoring, career support, registration, and financial services all make our students’ lives better.

One other component of goal two (and part of goal one), focused on career education. We improved the offerings in our Career Success Center, with new technologies, trainings, and access to remote internships. We also added career education courses (on a pilot basis), as we had planned in the strategic plan action steps. Evaluation of their impact is next.

Goal three focused on community pride. Several efforts occurred that should be acknowledged. First, we did increase weekend events for our residential students, and we offered more social events for faculty and staff pre-pandemic. We hope to bring them back soon. And the long awaited decision about a new mascot is now complete. Go Wolves!

Goal four focused on branding. We took some initial steps with the help of a consultant, which resulted in new colors and some improved consistency in materials. The recent hiring of new Director of Marketing and Communication should jumpstart this initiative. I can already see an impact on our website.

Goal five focused on creating a self-sustaining financial model. We made some strides in evaluating a limited number of academic programs, but everything else stalled on this one. More focused action must take place now.

There was a budget retreat (pre-pandemic) that included representatives from all campus constituencies. That meeting confirmed much of what the Strategic Plan had outlined. There was general agreement that we should grow graduate programs, focus on adult learners, focus on supporting some of our students who meet admission requirements but need extra attention, find a way to re-imagine summer, and work on become an HSI. It also focused on some cost-cutting measures, but the ideas in that category were few and far between. The items focusing on graduate and adult learners have been underway. The rest has stalled.

I recount all of this because I recognize just how exhausting the notion of a retreat without action sounds. The truth is that there has been action, but the impetuses behind that action and the results have not been well communicated. That is something that is going to have to change this time around. The commitment to action is of the utmost importance for us. Everyone will need to play a part, and everyone will need to be on the same page as to what is happening when.

So, for this retreat, the goal is to establish a plan of action for WCSU. We will first take the time to review the realities of our position. We’ll examine the costs and results of all that we do and, I hope, come to a full understanding of our place in the higher education context right now. Then we will get to work. That work will involve focused conversations about what we can grow and what we should stop doing. We will need to reimagine how we function as an organization and where we might change our structures to improve that function and/or gain efficiencies and reduce costs. We will try to determine a campus focus that helps us carve out our own special place in the higher education ecology of our region. It will be a very busy two days.

The result of this retreat must not be a report. It must be a plan of action that will move us forward together. It must include a clarity of purpose and definitive steps to achieve that purpose. It must describe a path first to stability and then to prosperity. The full community must endorse the plan so that we can move forward together. The retreat is necessary for the development of this plan. The action is necessary for our survival.

Higher Education, Resilience

A United Vision

ProvostMissy@WCSU

As I drove to work this morning, I was overcome with concern for the future. Like many universities in the Northeast, we are trying to navigate the “demographic cliff” – long projected and clearly already here in Connecticut. Projections for high school graduates in the region continue to drop for the foreseeable future, and we have no choice but to re-think what we do. This re-thinking of what we do is not in our nature.

Well, that isn’t fair. We actually re-imagine courses and majors on a regular basis. Our program reviews and annual assessments drive some changes, emerging technologies and industries drive others. Indeed, in the last five years – un-slowed by the pandemic – WCSU has added six new graduate degrees – all designed to prepare students for jobs that are in-demand in the region. We also re-imagined our education degrees at the undergraduate and graduate levels to help meet the demand for, not just subject matter expertise, but also regional need for support for English Language Learners, and advanced certifications that support career advancement. We also closed two graduate degrees that were not attracting enough students. This was hard, but we did it.

At the same time, several of our undergraduate degrees have been re-imagined. Accounting, for example, has focused on tools for data analytics. Justice and Law Administration is adding a homeland security option. Social Work has strengthened its focus on social justice. Courses are regularly updated, and faculty have added new topics that speak to changes in student interests. History, Anthropology/Sociology, and Political Science have all added courses that call attention to the many peoples and voices that should be represented in a quality undergraduate degree. Important topics like Undocumented Migration, Race and Power in US History, The Irish in America, Model UN, Public Anthropology and Sociology. These additions also required a hard look at under-subscribed courses and decisions to eliminate some offerings.

We are also working hard to re-imagine the balance of online versus on-ground courses we offer. At the graduate level, most programs are now online or hybrid. With a focus on working adults, this transformation has been necessary to help them succeed while juggling jobs and families. We had been moving this way slowly, but the pandemic accelerated our path. At the same time, we identified several undergraduate degrees that could be good opportunities for students seeking degree completion options. Last week we had great news from our accrediting body that will allow us to move forward in offering these online degree completion options.

No, we are not complacent or even particularly slow moving. We have been working hard as part of our regular curricular review processes to evolve to meet the needs of our students and to broaden our offerings for adult learners. All of this has been happening slowly and steadily as a result of our last strategic plan. Unfortunately, our efforts – abundant as they may be – have not kept pace with the demographics. We are in a jam.

Although we are excellent at re-thinking things in constrained spaces (courses, majors), we are less adept at evaluating the full scope of what we do. Despite several recent attempts to work across departments, schools, and divisions, we are siloed.

  • Four separate schools have four separate visions of the university. None of those visions include perspectives from Student Affairs or Enrollment Services. How can we compete for a dwindling number of students without a unified vision?
  • Our student supports are distributed across three divisions, with limited coordination of efforts, and despite intense effort, with limited effect. How can we improve our retention and graduation rates without a unified plan?
  • Our campus is split between two locations, and the strains on one are different from those on the other. Yet, the use of these spaces has not been thoroughly aligned with projected enrollments, costs of degrees (including the types of spaces necessary to support them), costs of student support services and student activities delivered on two campuses. How can we build efficiencies in our operations without a thorough review of everything and a will to do things differently?
  • The coordination of schedules, the most basic of requirements for student success, eludes us every semester. Walking through our classroom buildings tells the tale. It is a sea of over specialized rooms that are empty far more than they are occupied. How can we build schedules that are both cost effective and easily navigable by students, without taking a more centralized view of our scheduling processes?

These are the conversations we have been unsuccessful in navigating. We try in fits and starts, with ad hoc committees, special initiatives, and even in developing our strategic plan, but somehow it just doesn’t come together or stay together. This big-picture thinking is not well-defined in our governance processes and routines. Indeed, those documents are really designed to keep our silos in place. It is not necessarily intentional, but it is the result. Those silos are not working for us. It is from this larger perspective that the real re-thinking has to take place.

I think we are ready to do this work together. I am excited by the possibilities the important conversations ahead might reveal. But whatever we discover together, the most important result must be a united vision and a map to achieve that vision quickly. A united vision is essential to our future: separate initiatives are no longer serving us well.

Engagement, Higher Education, Innovative Pedagogies

From Evolution to Revolution

ProvostMissy@WCSU

Over the last year a group of dedicated faculty and staff, all members of our standing assessment committee, have been working to define our university outcomes. This effort is meant to help us see the big picture of the goals of WCSU. University outcomes ask us to consider the connections between majors, general education, minors, electives, co-curricular programs, etc., and their collective impact on our students. When established, they will also provide a path to determining if we are achieving them. This has been a somewhat daunting task, but the committee members have worked hard, and we are nearly there.

When we started this conversation two years ago, I supplied the team with records of all of the established learning outcomes in every major at the university. In addition, I suggested that our general education curriculum and the university’s mission, vision, and values were great places to look for clues as to how to begin. Taking that information together, the things we value as a university started to come into focus. After a few rounds of analysis, forays into drafting language that sprang from those sources, and one focused retreat, the committee emerged with a proposal that is a good reflection of who we are. This backward mapping was very effective as a process, and after incorporating the edits suggested by the broader campus community, this list will stand as an excellent start for defining our shared goals. Bravo.

University outcomes encourage us to look at how things weave together. We are often so busy focusing on our specific tasks in majors or academic support programs or athletics that we don’t look at the whole. Establishing shared goals focuses our attention on how all areas interact. They suggest a path to collaboration that is exciting. Having a standing committee with representatives from faculty, staff, and administration has been a great place to move this conversation forward. This is an important step for WCSU, one that I hope will inspire great conversations at our university.

But I must admit that as we approach the finish line (I hope), I am feeling a little restless. You see, even as that very good work has been taking place, I have been immersed in conversations about the ways that we are failing to reach all of our students. Three different groups (committees, leadership teams, program leaders) have just reached out to me about retention. Each one was trying to discern the reasons why students leave and what next steps we might take to reach them. The answers to their questions are both simple and complex; simple in that I know that the greatest predictor of losing our students is actually their high school GPA, complex in that after accounting for that predictor there are many other subtle factors that lead students out the door. We have taken important steps to address the main predictor; there is more work to do on the rest.

At the same time that those earnest and important questions emerged, I ended up in two wonderful conversations about engaging students in the first year. WCSU already as a first-year course, but these conversations led to an observation about the totality of that first-year experience. In one, we were discussing ways to connect students to our community, in another we were talking about learning experiences that first year students should have. These were exciting conversations and the ideas we explored reflect so well on my colleagues. They are feeling the gaps in the experiences our students are having and trying to innovate and respond.

But I worry, because whenever we get into these discussions about better ways to support the students at a high risk of leaving, or about creating learning experiences that might be more engaging for this generation of learners, we always get bogged down in questions of time, effort, and resources. These are important considerations, but they often derail us before we begin. It is clear we are feeling the need to change. I don’t want those good impulses to get derailed. I am just as exhausted by the juggle as my colleagues are, and I am well aware of our limited resources, so it would be easiest to just pause with the university outcomes and wait a minute. But I find myself feeling that there is no time to waste. I default to my usual perspective–let’s focus on productive changes, while we conspire to do less. Ironically, doing less will take an immense effort. I think the effort might be worth it.

This effort is a lot to ask for, I know. But the questions raised by faculty and staff and students on a daily basis, tell me that this is not a moment to tweak what we do; it is time for real change. So, just as we finish this task of establishing our shared goals, I am thinking of next steps. This time we shouldn’t be backward mapping to what we already do. Instead, we should give full reconsideration to the question of how the learning experiences we design (curricular and co-curricular) interact to engage our students. We should be thinking about how those experiences can help students seize control of their lives and empower them to create the world they want to live in. We should draw on the full range of expertise on our campus to create meaningful connections between ideas, instead of separating them by departments and divisions. We should work to undo the biases built into federal and state regulations that privilege the student who can survive five classes a semester and rebuild our programs to outsmart those rules. We should remember to consult the vast body of research on instructional design throughout. And so much more.

So, why am I restless about those university outcomes? Well, I’m not really. They are a great place to start to focus our efforts and examine our decisions in light of a common set of goals. Those goals are not contradictory to the next project I have just outlined. They will help us evolve as a university, connecting people and ideas that we have struggled to connect in the past. I hope these shared goals will foster conversations at every level of our university, so we can make good decisions about what we are investing in and the experiences we are designing to achieve them. They can propel us forward, even as they reflect the past.

But establishing these outcomes is not enough because we don’t just need to evolve, we need a full-scale revolution. No time to pause… ready, set, go.

Accountability, Change, Higher Education

The Limits of Ad Hoc Committees

ProvostMissy@WCSU

In 2012, when I first came to Western Connecticut State University, one of my new colleagues asked me if I was more of a spreadsheet person or an idea person. I happily responded, ideas, and then found my life fully immersed in spreadsheets. The truth is that I am both. I have ideas every single day, but I need to ground them in data, considering the context and cost of an initiative, and planning to measure the impact. As far as I can tell one cannot lead without having some ideas and then vetting them; it is the job.

As I reflect on the work we have done over the last ten years, I see that a lot of good has come out of the back and forth between data and ideas. Our revised general education curriculum seems to have had a positive impact on our graduation rates. I can’t measure causality on this one, but I think the implementation of the First Year Navigation course as part of the gen-ed, coupled with greater transparency in our requirements must be part of the reason why those numbers have improved. I can say for sure that after it was implemented the number of requests for last minute waivers or course substitutions because students had missed a hidden rule in the requirements decreased. There is still room for improvement, but I think the change has overall been a win for student success. This work was completed through the work of our Committee on General Education, working through governance and responding to input. Not everyone was happy, but decisions were made.

Driven by enrollment data and the not so great news about declining high school graduates in New England, I have worked with colleagues to support the development of new graduate degree programs. These programs have been much more informed by regional workforce needs (nursing, addiction counseling, education, healthcare leadership) than our older paths to curriculum development. Indeed, we have had to face facts about enrollment data in some of those older degree programs and we made the decision to close a few. Whether these new programs will be enough to fill the gaps in recruitment at the undergraduate level remains to be seen, but the signs are promising, and I am monitoring outcomes. The curricular changes followed our normal governance processes, with a little extra support in terms of projected demand for new programs and a commitment to looking at our own enrollment trends for faltering programs. Not everyone was happy, but decisions were made.

Close scrutiny of our retention rates has led to the development of our new peer mentor program. After years of asking ourselves who we were losing, and in some cases, just feeling overwhelmed by the many potential factors, a look at the patterns in our retention data gave us clear direction. As the chief evaluator of our outcomes data, I instigated this conversation. Starting first with a standing university committee, I thought the path would be relatively smooth. Unfortunately, it was not, and after being rejected at that level, I moved to an ad hoc committee. The good news is some talented faculty and staff worked together to move this one forward. That bad news is it took three years to implement. There was progress, and we are measuring outcomes, but I was unsuccessful in communicating the urgency of the situation. Still, decisions were made.

As a strong believer in shared governance, I do my very best to move initiatives forward through our normal university processes. At WCSU, we have very positive governance structures in place, structures that I am immensely proud of, because they recognize the collaboration that must take place between faculty, staff, students, and administration. Most of our committees have representation from all of those constituencies on them. This encourages free discussion and the engagement of ideas from all areas. Most of the time this works very well, if somewhat ploddingly. Nevertheless, there are moments when an idea does not really fit in our normal structures and I generally choose to ask for an ad hoc committee to be appointed (sometimes by me, sometimes through Senate leadership), to explore those ideas. Unfortunately, these committees do not seem to reach the point where decisions can be made.

Over the last few years, I have relied on ad hoc committees to try to help me sort through several initiatives or questions. Of those several, only one has managed to truly move an idea forward. It has been a lesson in leadership for me. To be clear, I have utterly failed to impress upon those involved, the importance of the initiatives for the university’s future. It is likely that I was less than clear in the goals as well. I take the blame for the lack of clarity, but I am perplexed as to what to do next.

It isn’t that I expected those committees to return reports that looked exactly like what I thought they would when we started the conversation. If that were the case, it would not be an ad hoc committee exploring a question, but an implementation team. The point of the committees was to look at the starting material/question and then consider a variety of ways to address those questions. In this spirit I met with each group to outline what I thought the pertinent questions about the topic were and then opened things up for the questions and ideas. In each case, the committees asked for clarifications, which I tried to provide, and then they went to work. I stepped back and let the group’s wisdom take hold.

Unfortunately, in nearly every case, people seemed to either be unable to resolve debates within the committee, or they veered off in an unanticipated direction that completely transformed the original charge. Oh well. People did their best. Obviously I was not clear enough. That’s life.

Except some of these committees were formed to address urgent questions, questions that could have an impact on enrollment, or on campus climate, or on the general direction of the university, as we adjust to enrollment challenges and recover from a pandemic. Oh well, just doesn’t cut it. I have failed to lead.

This puts me in a quandary. You see, I don’t just say I embrace shared governance, I mean it. I know the limits of my imagination and I value the dialogue that our processes support. But I have clearly reached the limits of ad hoc committees because they are not leading to action. We need to take action. It is urgent.

I need a new path. I have to figure out how to move urgent things forward, things that have the potential to transform or bolster our campus, so that we might thrive in the face of that demographic cliff we are all staring at. Not all of our next steps will fit neatly into our defined structures so I can’t just default to the usual paths. I still value the input of the many, in all that we do, but I am worried about pace and I am worried about distractions. Decisions have to be made. It is time to regroup.

Higher Education, Innovative Pedagogies

The Ecosystem of Higher Education

ProvostMissy@WCSU

According to Brittanica.com, an ecosystem is “the complex of living organisms, their physical environment, and all their relationships in a particular unit of space.” This concept reminds us to look at how things interact with and influence each other rather than focusing on isolated instances of things. A convenient metaphor for interactions within commercial spaces, this term has been applied to contexts outside of the biological, things like healthcare, technology, housing, and so on. Today, I am thinking about higher education through the ecosystem lens.

Several years ago, I was at a legislative breakfast – a semi-annual ritual where our university hosts our local representatives to give them updates on all that is going on at WCSU. These are often pleasant affairs where we get to know each other and talk about our challenges, but also our strengths. At one such meeting, I was asked a pointed question out our university outcomes. The College Navigator tool had just become widely available, and so the focus on comparisons between schools and their retention and graduation rates had come into sharp focus. It was an interesting moment because it was clear that the tool itself did not yet give a context to those numbers, a context that should have demonstrated the differing expectations for those numbers depending on the type of school. I endeavored to explain.

While every college and university strives to support every student to degree completion, there are striking differences in types of campuses, programs, and student needs at each. All of those differences impact our outcomes. It is no surprise that elite campuses, who only admit the most prepared students, have very high retention and graduation rates. If they did not, it would be cause for concern. As admissions standards open to a more inclusive group of students, those numbers change. When you add things like the proportion of residential vs. commuter students, high need vs. middle income students, state appropriations sufficient to support reasonable student to advisor and student to faculty ratios, those numbers change again. Despite the goal of 100% degree completion all of these factors make a big difference in those outcomes.

Now, it is not the case that a campus has no agency. Prioritizing a focus on student success strategies can make a difference. Investing in opportunities for faculty to engage new research about teaching can make a difference. Focusing on fundraising to help support those tremendously important last dollar student grants – grants that can keep a student from stopping out for lack of a few hundred dollars – can make a difference. If a campus can manage to do all of these things, it will likely rise to the top of the list for student outcomes among its peer group (taking into account all of those other variables).

But on that day eight or nine years ago, I was actually discussing something more akin to that ecosystem idea. In Connecticut that ecosystem includes UCONN (the research university that many outside of CT think is a private university), the Connecticut State Universities (regional comprehensives – 2 large, 2 small), Community Colleges throughout the state, Charter Oak College (the public online college), and a significant number of private colleges and universities (Sacred Heart, Fairfield, University of Hartford, Quinnipiac, University of New Haven, Yale, Trinity, and there are more). I was arguing, at that time, that we had different jobs to do, different students to serve, and we needed to be understood from that perspective. Don’t evaluate colleges and universities on one data point, I said, you want us to be different so that all students in the state have options. You need to consider how we work together. That was then.

Now we are all staring at that long-warned demographic cliff, and in a state as small as Connecticut, our crowded ecosystem has reached a critical moment. With so many of us competing for the same students with similar programs and accreditations, we are out of balance, and something will have to give.

But wait there’s more. Although most of us offer some online programs, large online providers from out of state are here, and their impact is already being felt. We have also seen the growth in popularity of Coursera, Google, and Amazon education programs, giving strength to the argument that there are many ways to prepare graduates for the jobs available in the region. That crowded landscape, coupled with the not so quiet questions being asked about the value of our traditional models, is causing panic (and it should), but perhaps it might inspire invention and adaptation instead.

As I think about our overbuilt higher education ecosystem, not just in CT, but in all of the Northeast, the natural impulse is to think about campus differentiation. Should we try to apportion out who will offer what? That question has been asked for years and outside of a few specialties, it is largely impossible to achieve. Universities must have a broad range of programs that interact with each other to create a quality liberal arts degree. We might haggle over a few specific degrees, but overall, there really isn’t room for much differentiation. This is a path that will not yield much change.

But I am wondering if this is an opportunity to adapt to this crowded landscape in a different way. Instead of focusing on the programs we offer, maybe we can specialize in approaches to teaching and learning. I’m thinking about a much more defined campus experience, curricular and co-curricular that are organized around a consistent teaching and learning model. It might be thought through based on those conditions I described at the outset -the types of students we serve and the types of campuses we support. Focusing on teaching and learning, instead of programs might help us find our niches, without losing the breadth of subject matter that we so value. It might allow us to improve our outcomes and be more specific about the kinds of support our campuses need to achieve these ends. It might help us articulate our specific value within this crowded world of higher education.

Taking this approach might help us reposition our questions about how many programs we can support, to how we might build a true educational identity that draws in an appropriate audience of students who have an excellent chance of success. I don’t know if this strategy could work, but what I do know is that something is going to have to change. We are at a tipping point in this ecosystem, so I am thinking it through.