Nominations are complete. This document will be the focus of Friday’s discussion.
Colleagues have suggested that these are among the most interesting sentences in Blueprint 2.0. They offer them for our conversation on February 17th in the Senate. We are continuing to try to answer the request made by Executive Vice President John Applegate to the Executive Committee in December to hear from this faculty much more about campus directions and vision.
Their nomination suggests that in these sentences are some projects or programs, some goals or values, that may be especially promising for our campus, in service to our region, going forward. In our conversation we will consider their suggestions together. Here, if you prefer, is a pdf copy.
Shared Vision
- [That the regional campuses will be known for providing students] an excellent education that prepares them for both a living and a life . . . [and distinguished in part by] a firm grounding in the liberal arts.
Section 1. Excellent, distinctive education and student experience
- Use AAC&U Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) learning outcomes to inform curricular decisions and assess learning.
- Ensure that all students have opportunities to learn from and work with full-time faculty members who are accomplished teachers who are expert, current, and active in their fields.
- Promote research involving students to develop lifelong skills in inquiry-based learning, such as depth of knowledge, persistence, and creativity.
- Support students in developing global awareness and competence.
- Develop programs for sharing research resources and equipment among Regional Campuses and with the Bloomington and IUPUI campuses.
- Adopt state-of-the-art methods for developing evidence of excellence in teaching and to support tenure, promotion, and teaching award decisions.
- Make courses that rely on the special expertise of particular faculty members or departments available, to the extent possible, to all Regional Campus students.
Section 2. Completion and Student Success
- Employ best practices from other institutions.
- Create a vibrant campus life that includes engaging academic, co-curricular, and extracurricular events and activities.
Section 3. Accessible and Affordable to Prepared Students
- Offer degree completion programs that attract, retain, and graduate former IU students who have stopped out.
- Develop year-round programs of study that enable timely or early degree completion.
- Develop and deploy best practices for supporting first-generation students from orientation to graduation.
- Engage at-risk students in the life of the campus through work, curricular, advising, co-curricular, and extracurricular activities.
- Adopt best practices for creating a culture supportive of diversity and inclusion.
- Provide through and individually tailored advice to incoming students (new or transfer) concerning the academic demands and financial costs of attaining a degree.
- Serve as a national model through our comprehensive efforts for effective financial literacy programs.
- Participate fully in enterprise-wide initiatives to support academic programs and to reduce administrative costs.
- Aggressively market the Regional Campuses as offering high-value IU degrees that provide a strong return on investment to students who successfully complete them.
Section 4. Connecting with Careers
- From their first contacts with IU, Regional Campus students will understand how their studies prepare them for careers, and they will be supported in discovering and pursuing career aspirations and opportunities throughout their education at IU.
- Make explicit connections in degrees, majors, and courses between instructional experience and valuable career skills, including development of high-level skills described in the AAC&U LEAP initiative.
- Develop pathway courses, “meta-majors,” and co-curricular and extracurricular opportunities to explore careers.
- Begin career awareness with orientation, with a goal of supporting active exploration of interests and possibilities.
- Provide a summer junior year “bridge out” program with internships and networking with alumni and local businesses for students who will be seeking jobs, and a parallel program for students planning to continue to graduate school that focuses on developing research proposals and networking within the academy.
- Include students wherever possible in community and regional engagement activities.
- Through an “I Hire IU” campaign, aggressively market the message that employers prefer to hire students who have the knowledge and skills encompassed by an IU degree.
Section 5. Engagement and Regional Development
- Each campus will prepare and at the next opportunity apply for Community Engagement Classification as determined by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
- Connect students’ education to the local community through academically grounded service commitments, requiring experiential coursework and activities directed to local businesses and organizations.
- Establish community-based, applied research laboratories at each campus for interdisciplinary study of regional needs.
- Engage in problem-solving and innovation with community and regional partners to address regional needs.
