University Leadership Council (Ulc) s1

UNIVERSITY LEADERSHIP COUNCIL (ULC) Minutes November 27, 2012

Attendance: Nivine Megahed, Christine Quinn, Tracy Costello, Brisbane Rouzan, McCeil Johnson, Marty Mickey, G. Maxx Shawlee, David SanFilippo, Sarah Brick, John Bergholz, Juliet Kasl, Tim Collins, Alison Hilsabeck, Kathleen Gorski, Holly Battaglia, Lauren Heidbrink, Steve Thompson, Traci Dennard, Marlene Suvada, Sarah Moss, Suzette Reed, Kimberly Michaelson, Generosa Lopez-Molina, Tom Bergmann, Carol Moulden, Erin Haulotte, Kathy Walsh, Lori Markuson, Chris Molaeb, Michael Ledoux, Cynthia Shaw, Julie Bechtold, Steve DeBenedetto, Madeleine Waxman, Scott Karakas, Bobbi Biringer, Marsha Watson, Tim Skoning, Amy Lefager, and Kathy Vandlik.

Agenda/Minutes: The agenda for the meeting was approved. The October minutes were approved by consensus.

The meeting began by introducing Chris Malaeb and Generosa Lopez- Molina, new dean of CAS/CMB and vice provost, respectively. Marty explained for the group and for the new participants the purpose of the University Leadership Council, which is a group that meets monthly to provide advice and counsel to the president on matters of importance to the University, including guidance on the strategic plan. It is made up of faculty and staff who are in leadership roles who can help provide insight from the various aspects of the different University departments.

What’s Happening: In this section, Marty indicated that the University had completed its annual audit and it went very well. We had no audit findings and no adjustments to our financial statements.

Suzette stated that they are working on a great cross college initiative with NCE and CAS on the Crown Foundation Grant. It ties in nicely with our commitment to community as it connects whole communities with working psychologists and educators. The essence of the grant is truancy reduction and resistance and education. They are looking at a whole community strategy, most likely targeting Little Village and our connections there. They are primarily focusing on high school students and perhaps a bridge program into NLU so that those who could go on to college could see higher education and wet their palate to the idea of it.

John spoke about the McCormick Grant he has been working with for about a year to support the veterans here and Harrison Fellows. One result is that on December 4, 2012, there will be a Linkedin training program here in the Atrium that will be offered free to veterans, first to NLU veteran students and then to others. We are collaborating with two other not-for-profit agencies, Connect Vets and National Able, who also received money from the McCormick Foundation. Marines for Life is also going to be involved. This will be an opportunity to get National Louis’ name out there to the Veteran’s community. The grant required us to first build a task force to give us outside guidance on the operation of that grant, particularly for the veteran’s component. John stated that he, with the help of Steve Curda, has put together an advisory council of 15 members. They are all dues paying members or gift giving members. There will be four meetings a year and they will provide outside guidance on the whole veteran’s program to Dr. Curda. The group will meet here at the Chicago campus on December 14, 2012. It’s a mix of people from the Chicago area and Washington D.C. Finally, John indicated that the University has put together the final steps in terms of a comprehensive corporate foundation approach for National Louis. Matt Deuponce will head this up with the help from Tom Foley. Basically, this will be approaching corporations not only for a gift, but also for enrollment purposes, careers, and internships.

Julie Bechtold stated that they just completed a hiring for the Employer Outreach Specialist. Her name is Emily Drake and she will be supporting the efforts for the veterans and Harrison Fellows and building those critical employer relations.

Sarah Moss stated that Advising hired their first male advisor, Jose. He will be working with ABS students in Chicago. Also, they are excited to have Olga Govea joining them from Enrollment very soon.

Lori Markuson from Enrollment indicated that the department will be servicing students over the holiday. On December 26, 27, and 28th, the department will be fully staffed for student facing services at the Chicago campus. We will also be at the Wheeling campus, but mainly for calling students to reach out.

Bobbi Biringer stated that Enrollment is currently projecting Winter enrollment at 656 students against the prior year of 670 and a start budget of 646 so they are looking to exceed budget.

Nivine was delighted to find out that Carlos Azcoitia has been appointed to the CPS school board. She wanted to reiterate the great job John and Steve are doing with their work with veterans. The group that John has assembled is a very illustrious group of individuals. It is a good thing that NLU stood its ground and set the expectation that if you sit on our advisory board that you will also help to support the university. This group has been very excited about participating and being a part of that. Also, Nivine indicated she was asked to sit on a panel at the Commercial Club that celebrated vets. This was sponsored by the McCormick Foundation and they invited us to be a part of talking to the broader Chicago community about what NLU is doing to serve vets. She was also asked to join a board called the Code of Support, which is an advisory board capacity. Coach Mike Krzyzewski from Duke University is a part of this board and Nivine is the first university president on the foundation board. Code of Support includes a group of retired generals who come together and lend support towards veterans who have served our nation. Nivine also discussed other fine work that is being done in Advancement. Nivine reminded everyone that on December 11 we have Connections and to please sign up. Also, consider entering the Talent show. There will be board members there and are excited about seeing the talent at NLU. We are having a presentation by Michael Rodgers who is known as a practical futurist. He is going to be talking about the kinds of disruptive forces and global change that is happening and how it will impact industries and education. Nivine also indicated that we have a very illustrious panel that will discuss the topics that Michael brings up in his presentation.

Marty stated that we will be doing a renovation starting in mid-January of the back half of the second floor of the Chicago campus. Advancement will be moving in from across the street and we are developing a history room as part of the advancement wing. There will be artifacts from the old Evanston campus.

Tom Bergmann reminded everyone that the deadline for applications for the emerging leaders program will be Friday December 7, 2012. It is a year-long professional development program for some of our “rising stars” and starting leaders.

Generosa provided an update on the New Idea Summit that was held on November 8. She wanted to thank everyone who participated. There were 25 proposals submitted for new programs that involved some critical review and cross college participation in terms of content areas. As a result, there are eight promising proposals that they will be revisiting. The committee will be working with faculty groups to see what we can prioritize and phase in over the next couple of years.

Kimberly Michaelson shared that she will be speaking on a panel at the CASE conference about how to get the most out of a small alumni shop. She is going to be trained on the Golden Apple selection committee so we can make more out of that relationship since we have so many alumni who are Golden Apple Award winners.

Seat Time/Credit Hour Compliance:

Christine shared that back in September we had our AQIP review completed. Many of you participated in the preparation for that. Marsha and her team provided a strong leadership role for that. It was an incredible visit where we learned from each other and received some positive feedback from our reviewers. With that there is also work to do and one of those areas is a compliance area and that relates to seat time. It is fairly complex, but Marsha, Kathleen, and a work group have begun to work on this to add some structure. It is not complete, but they come today to provide an update in terms of where they are at with their thinking, but also to test their thinking with this group. Both through an academic perspective and some of the benchmarks that they are creating for different activities and the time that is associated with those, as well as, to have the group as a whole think about how might this impact us as an institution.

Marsha stated that the benchmarks that are being proposed are not coming out of the Office of Institutional Effectiveness. They are faculty driven so we are facilitating faculty helping us with this effort. There are no standing models or guidelines. We are treading new waters and are doing a really good job. We have invented a process that we are sharing nationally.

Kathleen stated that as of July 2011, the Federal regulations governing assignment of academic credit stated that awarding one credit unit requires:

SH: 1 hour of classroom or direct faculty instruction and a minimum of 2 hours of out- of-class student work each week for 15 weeks. QH: 1 hour of classroom or direct faculty instruction and a minimum of 2 hours of out- of-class student work each week for 10-12 weeks.

As a University, we have to look through our courses to make sure we are in compliance and we did that before we had our site visit. We discovered there are classes that are not in compliance. Now we have to make changes in some areas. In class time is easy for everyone to understand because when you sit in a classroom; that is the time you are in a class. The new law does not require us to have in-class seat time. It requires us to have something called direct instruction. Direct instruction is direct instructor contact. You can be at home on the computer and emailing your instructor and that would be considered direct instructor contact. Watching a presentation your instructor is giving is considered direct instructor contact. Our goal is define ‘what is direct instructor contact’ and what is NLU going to count as direct instructor contact so when we look through our classes we can actually audit and prove that we are meeting the minimum hours that we need.

In looking, at direct instructional time, five different modalities have been defined as follows:

 Online  Face-to-face  Internship  Independent study  Blended

These are the five types of courses we offer at NLU and we need to define all five of them for direct instruction and student out of class work as well. We need to change the way we think. We have started Phase One of the process to redefine our credit hour compliance for all of our classes, which is defining these course modalities. How does on on-line course look at NLU for all colleges? How does a face-to-face course look for all colleges and all courses?

On November 1st, we had a meeting where faculty got together and we split them across colleges and they went through each modality. We had a group for four of the modalities and we left out blended because we are using the results from face-to-face to online to create the blended modality. Faculty sat together and defined different types of direct instruction and out of class work. They needed to get the best average time for how long it takes to do those things. Ultimately, we are going to have to account for time. On the online modality, the online group defined lecture for an on-line class.

The group of faculty defined could be direct instruction for lecture component for an online class.  Orient student to materials and technology, syllabus/course guide, student responsibility and policies  Lecture (on-line, live synchronous/asynchronous)  Student group activity writing (posting) and reading discussions  Guidance on library and technology resources  Required responses, discussion groups, chat rooms, blogs  Student presentations (individual, small group)  Peer discussions,  Quizzes  Multimedia or lab assignments

They defined things and the time that each of these areas would take. For example, orientation to technology was one thing they thought could count for direct instruction and 90 minutes sounded like a reasonable amount of time. We are using an average amount of time in all of these areas. We know it might be more for some and less for others, but we have to account for time.

We are in Phase Two of the process now and we have had a meeting where faculty sat down and defined things. We want as much participation as we possibly can have. A compliance web-site was launched last week and it went out to all full-time and adjunct faculty and all colleges. It lists all the modalities with the definitions that the faculty defined in the November 1st meeting and we want everyone to contribute and give their input as well. Ultimately, the faculty as a group has to decide how long these things are on average and all come to a consensus across colleges. Once feedback is gathered Kathleen will take and compile this information and have a presentation to the Faculty Association about the topic at Connections on December 14.

The next phase starts in January. This phase will involve the teachers going through their individual classes and use the definitions they defined and review them for compliance. Christina reminded us that we have to keep in mind that this is really about quality teaching and learning.

Breakout Session: The ULC then broke out into smaller groups on the following tasks: 1. Working as a group, identify issues and questions that may need to be addressed as part of the compliance process. 2. Indicate if a policy and/or a procedure will need to be changed. 3. For every question/issue, please identify an area of responsibility.

Some of the topics bought up by the smaller groups included the following:

 How do we communicate to students any changes?  How does this affect our enrollment processes?  What happens to students in classes who are in the middle of a class when all these requirements change? We need to have a policy that states students should not be penalized to finish that class at the current requirements.  We need to look at alternative ways of revenue generation to lessen the impact of additional hours for these programs.  We will have issues with course by arrangement because we need to justify students receiving financial aid for those courses.  Maybe for messaging, we ask alumni to partner with us to assist in getting out the message. Regarding messaging, we all must remember to be very positive regarding the changes.

The meeting adjourned at 12:03 p.m.

Next meeting: December 18, 2012, 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM (Chicago Campus–Board Room).

Respectfully submitted, Juliet Kasl