The Role of Educational Developers in Teaching and Learning Excellence
Educational developers (EDs) are change agents. They play a crucial role in helping colleges and universities adapt and respond to change. As technology advances and attention to student success, retention, and completion grows, EDs play an essential role in supporting faculty in creating the best possible student experience. The role...
Emotionally Intelligent Leadership That Empowers, Moves Culture, and Creates Engagement
The core of these beautifully powerful and elegantly simple concepts on the neuroscience behind emotionally intelligent leadership is the happy wedding of over 40 years of teaching and leading experience with the current research on motivation, learning, and empowerment. My leadership roles as a teaching professor, head college basketball coach,...
Double Deaning: Reflections in a Mirror
Nearly everyone finds twins interesting. That is so, in part, because twins are relatively rare, with only three or four out of 1,000 births producing twins and only about 25 percent of those being monozygotic—the technical term for “identical twins.” Even more rare are those identical twins who are known...
Proactive Advising: A Case Study
The Student Success Center (SSC) on my campus was a peculiar collection of resources. There was the campus testing center, where students took various standardized exams, and next to that the Office of Disability Services. In the remaining suite of offices were the staff who made up the advising side...
Lessons Learned from 13 Years as a Director of Online Education
Back in 2004 I made the decision to develop my first online course. I was using online discussions in one of my face-to-face classes and having success with them—really, my primary motivation to teach fully online. So in 2005 I took the leap and offered my first online class. No...
Student Engagement: The Key to Retention
As Steven C. Howey (2012) pointed out years ago, educators across the US are “frustrated with the challenge of how to motivate the ever increasing number of freshmen students entering college who are psychologically, socially, and academically unprepared for the demands of college life.” For the past 40-plus years, the...
Planning Community-Based Faculty Training and Professional Development at Your Institution
External faculty development has many benefits for improving teaching and academic programs, but these courses and training also come with limitations. The direct creation of an academic institution’s own faculty training and courses is one practical option to expand faculty professional development opportunities aligned with evidence-based teaching practices, institutional needs,...
Transitioning from Compliance to Innovation
Creating a culture for continuous improvement with academic programs is a challenge. As my institution—Sul Ross State University in Alpine, Texas—prepared for our decennial accreditation review, I found it difficult to motivate faculty to complete the required program reviews for the compliance report. With some cajoling, 41 faculty reluctantly agreed...
Partnering with Student Organizations to Build First-Year Student Engagement: Special Olympics Young Athletes and Merrimack College
Every day, academic leaders make decisions about what kinds of programming college first-year students will find attractive and engaging. Many colleges’ ideas, however, fail to connect to student interest and experience. Part of the reason for this disconnect is generational. The staff and administrators planning these programs are at least...
Colleges and Universities Need to Master Advanced Analytics (Psst… The Smart Ones Already Have)
Those in the trenches don’t need to be told higher education is facing serious challenges, but the reminders are everywhere. As reported by Inside Higher Ed, there’s a growing shortage of our prized input: undergraduates. Meanwhile the value of our output (a degree) is being questioned. A recent Gallup survey found that...
