Provide distinctive academic programs that effectively prepare students to become leaders and productive citizens in the global community.
- Ensure that academic programs are up to date and relevant, and aligned with professional and discipline standards.
- Enhance academic programs through the incorporation of diverse intellectual perspectives and cross-cultural competence.
- Through the Academic Master Plan process, develop and implement new academic programs and revise current academic programs, which respond to regional, state, national and international needs and student demands.
- Provide a campus environment (physical and virtual) that supports teaching, learning and scholarly and creative activities through appropriate academic facilities, libraries, instructional and technology resources.
- Enhance external support as appropriate for university academic programs and services through increased relationships with external partners.
- Enhance academic programs through the implementation of best practices in administrative, faculty and staff development.
- Promote high quality learning opportunities through curricular, co-curricular and extracurricular activities, such as experiential learning, internships, international learning experiences, civic engagement and service learning.
Please upgrade resources and tools to be more user friendly. We have programs rolling out in fall but yet no concrete marketing materials or info to give prospective students. Please consider and upgrade to degree audit to something more simplistic and user friendly. I would also like to echo the concerns of others. It is hard to attract and retain quality student facing professionals when our pay is not competitive with other area colleges.
While there are certainly professional development opportunities for faculty, I’ve noticed a marked drop-off in recent years in the amount of programming available. It’s also clear that the available opportunities for develop could be communicated to faculty much more clearly.
The goal of academic excellence is posited on “meeting demands” of others and on making programs “up to date,” which implies contextualizing what we do within the greater disciplinary and academic contexts. These goals are all well and good. However, if we want to develop leaders, we too need to be leaders in the kinds of academic experiences we provide for students. GSU should move toward a strategy that pushes the envelope in the way that it teaches students and engages with local and global communities.
If we want to educate students to be “leaders and productive citizens in the global community” as the Academic Excellence description indicates, it is important that we structure the curriculum so that all students gain some experience in language and culture through both classroom learning and study abroad/service learning. It’s impossible to be a productive member of the global community if one’s perspective is entirely informed by one’s experience living in the greater Chicago area. We currently offer Spanish as a second language, a minor in Spanish, and a minor in Global Studies, along with global elements embedded in other courses. Students would benefit if the university prioritized these offerings and made it clear to students – through advising, for example – that they should seek to include significant global learning components prior to graduation. Even better, these global learning opportunities should be integrated into the first-year curriculum and global competency should be required for transfer students prior to graduation. If this became a practiced value at GSU, we could eventually build an audience to offer language and culture courses in addition to Spanish. This would make our students more competitive for jobs, in Illinois, across the country, and abroad, with GSU reaping the benefit of successful alumni.
Fully support this approach. Our students, and for that matter, our faculty, need to engage in global community experiences. Promoting a second language through Global studies and Spanish will serve as a bridge between cultures. These skills in addition to global competency need to be embedded in first-year curriculum and required of transfer students. There is a world beyond the Chicago Southland and we need to prepare our students to become competent in this world.
Yes, indeed. I would like to see more global integration with cultural programming. These experiences are invaluable and are an integral part of global competency and cultural literacy.
Raises well below COLA are certainly a great way to destroy academic excellence. As time goes by faculty and staff will need to either get a second job to pay the bills or go elsewhere. But if they go elsewhere it will be impossible to hire new faculty or staff of the same caliber at the same salary. And the more we wait to make the adjustments, the more difficult it will be. Worried about the PR of adjusting salaries? The more we wait, the worst it will look. Keeping up with inflation is the minimum that needs to be done. But, what about the loses from prior years? They also need to be made up for.
I believe that academic excellence is not about taking the easy way and recruiting those that are likely to succeed. I think it should be about taking those who are at risk of failing and helping them succeed. It is easy to recruit a winner and have them win at GSU. Can we focus on those who need the most help and help them realize they too are winners?
There is also the argument for the utility of higher education. While we like to think it is the purest pursuit of knowledge and personal growth, is this what our students think and need? We should create many paths for many goals. A group of students may want career skills and quick graduation times to enter the workforce.
Innovative programs like micro-degrees, micro-certifications, and fast-track three-year undergraduate programs may be what our students want (even if we don’t agree). Also, in order to provide the best online learning experiences we need to support our faculty and provide them with the tools and resources (yes, even monetary) to develop meaningful and engaging learning experiences. We should focus on learning outcomes, not flashy courses with ‘cool’ use of technology. But we should also demand excellence from ourselves. Courses that do not meet standards should be removed and redesigned. Peer course evaluations should be the norm for online instruction.
Part of academic excellence is embracing new concepts and new ways of doing things. This approach involves nurturing and funding creative processes that deliver new ideas, even if they fail. Taking risks is necessary, and funding those risks is important. Not every investment has to have a payoff or be fiscally neutral. If we don’t try and fail then we can’t succeed.
Finally, let us be realistic about who we serve and what academic excellence means in their context. Look at our student profile an find out what success means to them, not what we may prescribe to them to succeed. When we know our student’s needs then we can truly meet and exceed their expectations.
Who are our students, and what matters most to them? How do we help them excel academically given their needs and expectations?
Ensuring that the programs and courses are up to date is critical. Faculty should have the responsibility for it. But this is a task that takes time and effort. Is it part of the primary responsibilities or a service? If it is a primary responsibility then it should have some credit assigned to it.
Not everything can be easily counted and not everything needs to have credit assigned to it. We, the faculty, are hard working professionals that have our students’ interests in mind. We do all of these things. It is our responsibility. It is our pleasure to do it.
This question is not a straightforward as one might think. Of course, faculty have primary responsibility for the curriculum. However, the modern context of higher education have extended these responsibilities beyond what happens within the classroom. Use of technology in online, face-to-face, and hybrid classes has created new, labor intensive tasks that demand more time and different skills than traditional lecture/discussion course structure. Modern demands in program accreditation have also heightened document responsibilities for student learning (i.e., assessment), strategy implementation, faculty qualifications (e.g., scholarly accomplishments), professional development, and community engagement. These demands have lead to increases in the number of administrators in higher education, in general, and at GSU, in particular. Unfortunately, administrators often view themselves more as ‘thought leaders’ than ‘administrative workers’ and end up creating more work for faculty that is unrelated to course interactions that result in learning and more related to administrative work that is pushed on to the faculty and labeled ‘service’. The inordinate amount of ‘service’ created by the administrative ‘thought leaders’ is an obstacle to Academic Excellence.
Do we really have an Academic Master Plan? Is it public so that everyone can see it? Can the entire faculty comment on it?
A one-day forum each semester is not enough to support internal development. We need to have much more faculty training opportunities available.
We especially need to put more emphasis on new faculty development. We hire great new faculty but often they haven’t received the training they need to be successful — especially when it comes to teaching lower division students and using technology effectively.
This is a critical goal. However, to be really a goal we need to also provide the resources to accomplish it. We already have great faculty and staff, but they are leaving to places where they are better paid. And it is difficult to hire top-notch faculty with the salaries that we offer.
CAES has a few workshops that are offered throughout the semester. Have you checked them out?
CAES used to have a staff of 5 with a Director of CAES and now it has a staff of 2 with no Director of CAES.