Category: Uncategorized

Social Media: Not a Brave New World

Although most postsecondary institutions now leverage social media channels to some extent for marketing and communications, alumni engagement, and teaching and learning, many of these efforts remain ad hoc and largely unintegrated with key strategic efforts within each division. An April 2011 survey of professionals at research institutions conducted by Slover Linett Strategies Inc. and mStoner in collaboration with the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) found that: Only 36 percent of professionals surveyed would describe social media use within their unit as “planned” (as opposed to “spontaneous”), and 65 percent would like to see the amount of planning increase 62 percent regard their unit’s use of social media as only “somewhat successful” in achieving strategic goals Because social media tools are new, it’s easy to assume that they require a new approach or a new “social media strategy.” Yet what is actually needed isn’t a new strategy, but rather a close look at your current strategy and a thoughtful analysis of how social media tools can be brought to bear on some of the challenges you face in meeting specific, strategic outcomes – such as increasing student yield, boosting the engagement of students in hybrid or online […]

In and Out of the Classroom: Using Social Media in Ways that Matter

Because so many students use social media tools – and because so many faculty use the same tools in their personal or professional lives – it can be tempting to bring social media into the classroom almost by default, on the assumption either that social media technologies are needed to engage students or that they will boost student engagement simply by their use. But social media technologies aren’t silver bullets – they are tools that can support efforts to address common pedagogical challenges. Here’s an example. CASE STUDY: TWITTER IN AN ITALIAN CLASS Perennial challenges in traditional (non-immersive) foreign language courses include a) how to best encourage student practice outside the classroom, where students have limited access to conversation in the new language, and b) how to aid students in moving beyond language “exercises” toward conversational fluency while within a classroom environment. In an intermediate Italian course at Montclair State University, Enza Antenos-Conforti had her students tweet to each other, in and out of the classroom, in 140-character strings of Italian. Antenos-Conforti then invited native Italian speakers she knows to join the tweeting, in effect adding an element of immersion to the language course. In her paper on the subject, […]

Course Materials for Mobile Devices: Key Considerations

In the past term, Duke University piloted a course in introductory chemistry that replaced the standard textbook and course materials with online, multimedia content collected by the instructor from open repositories, as well as materials developed by the instructor under creative commons. The content included video clips from recorded lectures, ePUB texts and PDF files, and recorded whiteboard animations, all housed online. Students gathered at small tables during the course sessions and collaborated to solve chemistry problems, accessing the course resources as necessary during the class via laptops, tablets, and smaller mobile devices. Rather than lecture at the front of the room, the instructor circulated among the students, checking their progress, offering advice, and asking guiding questions. The project was an experiment in selecting, creating, and using open-access educational materials on mobile devices, and in using classroom time to maximize collaborative learning, problem-solving, and application. The instructor piloting the project recognized that many students now access online course materials primarily through their mobile devices — not through a desktop computer. Projections by technology researchers over the past year confirm the immediacy of this trend: In a May 2011 survey, Gartner Inc. reported that the amount of time people currently spend […]

Managing Your Institution’s Social Media Channels

Many of the institutions seeing the greatest success in leveraging social media communications to help boost strategic efforts in marketing and communications, student recruitment, and alumni engagement have actually invested relatively little budget and few staff to the effort. Instead, these institutions’ marketing and communications offices have focused on identifying and leveraging those social media communications that are already happening, at varied points throughout the academic community. Coordinating university communications across multiple social media and traditional platforms can appear daunting, but the effort becomes simpler once you embrace the decentralized nature of social media, and then move to provide the necessary central resources to integrate, aggregate, and make the best use of the content that your faculty, staff, and students are already creating on social platforms. Your central channels can then tap those sources of content when needed to aid you in meeting specific objectives. To learn more, we reached out to social media veterans Alan Webber, industry analyst and managing partner for Altimeter Group; Tim Jones, interim executive creative director at North Carolina State University; and Patrick Powers, director of digital marketing and communications at Webster University. Here is their advice on: Identify Your Content and Your Contributors Much […]

Checking for Policies and Procedures that Impede Student Success

Last July, we interviewed a past college president, a current college president, and a vice president of student affairs, about the need to review and audit institutional policies and procedures that delay students in progressing toward their degree — and they had specific tips on where to start looking for “bottlenecks.” This week, we decided to take a more in-depth look at how enrollment managers can make strides in identifying process bottlenecks that can frustrate and slow students. We interviewed Susan Leigh, associate vice president of enrollment management and marketing at DePaul University, and Lawrence T. Lesick, vice president of enrollment at Ohio Northern University, who have each fostered a true “customer service” approach in enrollment management at their institutions. Leigh and Lesick have specific advice to offer related to: Reviewing Student Complaints “Most frequently, student complaints emerge around the speed of getting a critical task done. Periodically review complaints, and when you find bottlenecks, take them apart. Often, behind that bottleneck, there is an outdated policy or an outdated procedure. Get the right people around the table, ask them directly: How can we improve this service for the student?”Susan Leigh, DePaul U For example, DePaul University, which enrolls a large […]

Changing the Culture of Space Allocation

As more postsecondary institutions undertake space management initiatives, those tasked with such initiatives are finding that they face challenges not just in inventorying and benchmarking space utilization, but in grappling with a siloed campus culture and attitudes of ownership toward space. Yet if institutions are going to meet increasing and competing demands for more space to enable more teaching and more research, it will be critical for academic and administrative leaders to treat campus space as a strategic asset, and for space management to cease to be an isolated function within facilities services and be seen as a shared responsibility across the institution. “We need to make it clear that space is not owned by a department; it is allocated to a need or an activity, to contribute to that activity’s success. We need to set the expectation that as activities shift in priority, space reallocation will be necessary.” Phil Rouble, Algonquin College   When we interviewed Frances Mueller, the University of Michigan’s assistant vice provost for academic and budgetary affairs and recently the project manager of the institution’s Space Utilization Initiative, early this year, she stressed the need to promote a collective commitment to stewardship of the campus’ physical […]

Strategies for Supporting a Diverse Faculty

While the diversity of undergraduate student populations is steadily increasing, faculty diversity continues to lag, especially in fields such as engineering and science. To see what could be learned from institutions that have made real strides in this area, we reached out to Wanda Mitchell, vice provost for faculty development and inclusive excellence at the University of New Hampshire, and Myron Anderson, associate to the president for diversity and associate professor of education technology at the Metropolitan State University of Denver. Anderson and Mitchell suggest that to really see gains in fostering a diverse faculty, you need to: “In removing the impediments that minority faculty face, at the end of the day you are creating better resources, tools, and policies for all of your faculty. When you are working toward “inclusive excellence,” you create a situation where everyone wins.”Myron Anderson, Metropolitan State University of Denver Reviewing Your Policies Mitchell suggests that the first step is to review your tenure and promotion policies — and make them more prescriptive. For example, ensure that there are clear guidelines for a structured conversation between department chairs and faculty at the annual review, and that both parties know how to prepare for that conversation. “It’s […]

The Changing Shape of Title IX Compliance: Update

(A less detailed version of this article appeared in Higher Ed Impact in May 2011. This week, we returned to Title IX compliance experts Betsy Alden and Jeff Orleans to dig deeper into additional tips and strategies for Title IX compliance. At the end of this article, Betsy Alden also offers a Title IX primer for institutions seeking to audit their compliance.) Last year, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) altered the 1979 “third prong” standard for Title IX compliance, changing an interpretation from the prior administration, and recently, at the NCAA’s May 2011 Gender Equity Forum, an OCR official sought to clarify what Title IX compliance entails; the resulting picture suggests a need for more rigorous standards and assessments than have been seen over the past decade. To learn more about what’s changing and where institutions need to be proactive in order to manage their Title IX liability, we turned to Betsy Alden (who has conducted many Title IX reviews for higher ed institutions) and Jeff Orleans (who helped write the original regulation for Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972) with Alden & Associates Inc. A Shift from the Past What became apparent from the OCR representative’s remarks […]

Proactive Approaches to Deferred Maintenance

YOU’LL ALSO WANT TO READ: Benchmarking Deferred Maintenance: A Recent Survey (May 2012)How Do You Make the Case for Funding Maintenance and Renewal for Campus Facilities? (May 2012) Many institutions of higher education are being squeezed between two pressures: a growing deferred maintenance backlog and increasing needs for capital expansion as they compete for students, faculty, and research dollars. For a number of years, the majority of campuses have remained focused on short-term planning for facilities investments, deferring maintenance needs until a later date (but often without reliable data on facilities condition). This continued deferral of maintenance needs is placing greater strains by the year on already limited budgets for facilities management. It’s critical to develop a sustainable model for funding facilities replacement and renewal. To learn from successful models currently in place at two very different institutions, we turned to Faramarz Vakili, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s associate director of the physical plant, and Kathie Shafer, the vice president for operations at Messiah College. These models are both creative in their approaches to funding maintenance needs and forward-thinking in their prioritization of facilities projects. “No one wants to fund repairs for HVAC or roofing. It’s not sexy. There’s no pizazz in it. […]

Taking Engagement to the Next Level: Building Achievement Networks

Alumni and other prospects desire more meaningful engagement with your institution, meaning a continuation of the learning experience, connection with their peers, and (if they are to become volunteers and donors) a sense of shared purpose and of shared work toward a common cause. Jim Langley, president of Langley Innovations, argues that one of the most effective ways to build a sense of shared purpose is to share successes — and he notes that while colleges and universities often publicize their successes through press releases, they frequently miss many more meaningful opportunities to leverage success stories to build constituency. Langley suggests that institutions have many unrealized opportunities to engage those individuals who may not have been previously connected with the institution but who have an impact in the lives of the institution’s best and brightest. The basic idea is that when celebrating the successes of students at the high end of educational attainment (for example, students who have received a distinguished graduate fellowship or who are graduating in the top 5 percent of their class), institutions could also be reaching out to those students’ personal networks and inviting them into the celebration and afterward into sustained engagement with the institution. We asked Langley […]

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