The Top SCUP10 for December 2011

December 5, 2012 | Ann Arbor

What Are Higher Ed Planners Thinking About?

Higher education leaders and others are disagreeing about a possible higher education bubble. If there is a bubble, could small colleges and the humanities be the canaries in the higher education coal mine? Integrated planning like the Futures Initiative at Smith College, David Orr’s regional initiative, the Oberlin Project (both of those very good news for small colleges, as is HASTAC for the humanities), and the University of Florida development project demonstrate innovation and optimism for long range institutional direction planning. But author Daniel Kahneman, in Don’t Blink! The Hazards of Confidence, alerts us to the inherent danger of overconfidence among professionals. Meanwhile, interest is constant in better understanding students and the use of campus space on their behalf.

Top 10 (of more than 200) Selected News & Resources

1. When Will the Higher Education Bubble Explode? | Forbes
2. Don’t Blink! The Hazards of Confidence by Daniel Kahneman | The New York Times
3. The Futures Initiative Strategic Thinking Process | Smith College
4. David Orr's Regional Initiative, The Oberlin Project | The Chronicle of Higher Education
5. Worried? I’m Terrified: Essay on the push for radical changes in higher education | Inside Higher Ed
6. Make Way for Millennials: A SCUP Portfolio on How Students are Shaping Higher Education | Society for College and University Planning
7. University of Florida Builds Innovative Complex for Economic Development | St. Petersburg Times
8. So You Want to Get a PhD in the Humanities? | YouTube
9. The Third Place, Pecha Kucha 20x20 | YouTube
10. 4-Year Institutions Starting to Worry? | Inside Higher Ed

These are the 10 most popular recent knowledge resources from among 200+ shared with several thousand visitors to social media venues of the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP) during November 2011.

A worthy slide show by George Siemens:

Words are funny things. Or maybe it’s that people are funny about some words: some words engender emotional responses far in excess of their meaning. It’s at that point that sometimes it’s worthwhile to avoid those words altogether and come up with alternatives.

One of our favorites is planning. Hard for a SCUPer to admit, but to some “planning” connotes a lack of action, the proverbial report on the shelf. On the contrary, planning is a very active enterprise. It is the act of making informed choices.  When we talk to people about making informed choices – about academic programs, institutional mission, the program for a facility – then planning makes a lot more sense, and they don’t tune out as much. The steps involved in good planning – defining the issue or problem, collecting relevant data, analyzing alternatives, setting priorities and making choices to do some things and not do others – are what go into the informed part of making informed choices. Using the phrase puts a bit more emphasis on outcome, not just process.

We’ve been thinking a bit about another hot button word – interdisciplinary. The connotations can be scary – sharing labs, sharing grants, putting tenure at stake. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interdisciplinary for a very interesting discussion about the barriers to interdisciplinary activity in higher education.) But the push toward consolidation is as indisputable as the new "interdisciplines" that have formed: biomedical engineering, neuroscience, cybernetics, and so forth.

Are there alternative words or phrases that we can substitute, that might reduce the negative reaction to the notion of cross- or multi- or interdisciplinary research and learning? What about integrative research? We’re looking for more – any ideas?

We hope SCUPers enjoy this new book. At the moment, it is only available on SCUP's website for live viewing and cannot be downloaded. Note that you may click on the grey "comment" balloon just to the left of the ID number of each image. When you do, you will go to a SCUP photo gallery where you may comment. At the other end of that link is also a URL that SCUP members can use to download original scanned images for their own professional use, with permission from Dick Dober and SCUP.

Harnessing the Power of Feedback Loops is a Wired magazine article by Thomas Goertz. It seems useful to better understand this for change management. He also discusses the use of real-time sensors and responders, which could be useful for planners.

A feedback loop involves four distinct stages. First comes the data: A behavior must be measured, captured, and stored. This is the evidence stage. Second, the information must be relayed to the individual, not in the raw-data form in which it was captured but in a context that makes it emotionally resonant. This is the relevance stage. But even compelling information is useless if we don’t know what to make of it, so we need a third stage: consequence. The information must illuminate one or more paths ahead. And finally, the fourth stage: action. There must be a clear moment when the individual can recalibrate a behavior, make a choice, and act. Then that action is measured, and the feedback loop can run once more, every action stimulating new behaviors that inch us closer to our goals.

When SCUP members were last surveyed, most used LinkedIn for professional networking and Facebook for personal networking. A new Facebook app might change that. We tried it, Branch Out. It's good enough that we think you should give it a try. As we "went to press" we learned of a second, similar app: In the Door, but haven't investigated it enough to say more than that it does not appear to be as fully fleshed out as Branch Out.

As one review of the app said:

We think building a career networking app on top of Facebook’s social network is actually brilliant because it taps into very real and vibrant connections within a social graph, not just the sometimes stale professional Rolodex stored in a LinkedIn profile.

So, we did it. It's basically another way to filter, sift, and experience Facebook data about your friends, all focused on their career profiles, no playful stuff. After a few, easy steps - very easy, maybe 15 seconds - we got what you see below.

The bells and whistles in this app are great, too. There is an activity feed that tells you when your friends make changes to their career profiles in Facebook, for example. How many companies, which, filterable, do you have friends at. Do those companies have jobs. It appears to be useful.

We think it will go wildly viral and can't imagine why Facebook is not already doing this within its own structure. It's worth the five minutes that it will take to become addicted to it. And I would take anyone's bet that the percentage of SCUPers using Facebook for business will go up a lot in the next year.

more

Please note that if you find this topic significant, on August 16 at Valencia, Community College (Orlando) SCUP's Southern Region is holding an on-topic one-day Metro Mini Conference, Higher Education Planning in a Time of Change and Challenge. Valencia Community College is mentioned in this comprehensive article, and several conference speakers are quoted. The conference is very much about the challenge of obtaining more graduates: budget, policy, and integrated institutional direction planning. Speakers include: Sanford Shugart, president of Valencia Community College; Tony G. Waldrop, provost, University of Central Florida; Lewis C. Godwin, director of Planning & Projects at Georgia Perimeter College; Susan E. Kelley, vice president, Institutional Advancement, Valencia Community College; and Ruth L Prater, campus president, East and Winter Park campuses, Valencia Community College.

Go to Community College, Earn a Bachelor's Degree: Florida Likes That Combination is a valuable, deep look by Chronicle of Higher Education reporter Jennifer Gonzalez. Nationally, 17 states allow community colleges to award bachelor's degrees. Florida's a leader. Here's a quote from the article about President Sanford C. Shugart of Valencia College:

Sanford C. Shugart worried that the plan might create a 'slippery slope' and interfere with the open-access mission of colleges like h is: The bachelor's degree programs at the community colleges have admissions requirements. Mr. Shugart is no longer entirely opposed to the idea - his college offers two baccalaureates - but he emphasis that the state must ensure that such degrees continue to he related only to the state's work-force needs.

Read more at this link, which may, after a period of time, require you to have a Chronicle subscription or purchase a day pass.

This article from Planning for Higher Education's January 2010 issue, is the updated results of an ongoing environmental scanning process by Herman Miller. We've decided to share it with the larger higher education audience, so please do let your colleagues know that this is available here. The embed below, is from SCUP's publishing presence on Scribd. We'd like to call your attention to the authors' trend #7:

Advances in technology will drive ongoing changes in all aspects of college and university life and offer new opportunities to enhanced and broaden learning experiences. ... There is no service of activity conducted in higher education that will not be affected by advances in technology. t is time to conduct a comprehensive and holistic institutional review of this rapidly growing tool.

There will be a related conversation on SCUP's Linked in group of ~2,500 participants (newly named the Integrated & Well-Planning Campus) this week, beginning in the afternoon of Tuesday, June 21, led by SCUP board member Michael Hites of the University of Illinois Administration and Kelly Block, also of the University of Illinois. They are presenting a half-day workshop on Sunday, July 24 near Washington, DC, titled: Designing IT Governance to Facilitate Decision Making Across the Organization. It's the kind of workshop you want to attend when you consider the quote above about the impact of technology on everything and everyone.

You may not have yet read this Planning for Higher Education article from October 2010, so we've posted it here for you, and added this link to an experimental SCUP beta semantic analysis of the article, by Michael Rudden of DiMella Schaffer. Scroll down past the image to see a few bullets from the analysis.

Enjoy! And please share with campus colleagues. They don't often get to see what's in SCUP's journal. Thanks. 

P.S. Note this related SCUP workshop on July 23, near Washington, DC., Capital Projects in a Campus Environment: Organizing and Running a Successful Project Team.

• A review of ongoing campus facilities planning projects, coupled with a review of more than 30 recent campus master planning requests for proposals and the relevant literature, indicates that colleges and universities are finding innovative ways to do more with less in response to this challenging economic environment.
• By integrating their facilities planning with current strategic, academic, and financial plans-a key tenet of the Society for College and University Planning's publication A Guide to Planning for Change (Norris and Poulton 2008)-these institutions are better positioned to proactively evaluate and respond to economic challenges and turn them into opportunities.
• Integrating education technology planning with academic, financial, and facilities planning enables colleges and universities to explore and evaluate the potential impact of alternative pedagogical and technological approaches to delivering educational content.
• These distressed properties are being acquired by nearby institutions that plan to convert them (in some cases in partnership with developers) into, respectively, a hub for a new research venture, a technology education center, continuing education classrooms, a branch-campus expansion, an administrative office building, and short-term "swing space" with parking during campus renovation.
• These strategies include deferring or downsizing planned construction projects, using existing instructional space more intensively, reducing facilities operating costs by closing facilities, improving campus sustainability, and reducing information technology (IT) expenses.

• The report, Faculty Productivity and Costs at the University of Texas at Austin, from the Center for College Affordability and Productivity (CCAP) ...
• is based on data released by UTA for use by an internal study group. Download it here (XLS).
• The CCAP analysis of UTA data has been controversial since its recent publication.
• The Texas Tribune has had good coverage of this and other higher education-related battles in Texas.

Below: Take the interactive betaSCUP Analysis Tool  of this document for a test drive.

At this link, SCUP has used a beta semantic intelligence functionality to create an interactive tool that permits you to analyze the document in its entirety. According to that analysis, the following are the top ten bullet points to be made from "reading" the ACCP report. (At the interactive link you can see that in anywhere from 3 to 100 bullet points, interactively.)

• In other words, 16% of the faculty both bring in no externally sponsored research and also have some of the lowest teaching loads while even those faculty who carry some of the highest teaching loads also perform some of the externally funded research.

• The 20% of the faculty with the lowest teaching loads (again, a total of 840 faculty members) carry only 2% of the total teaching load (or 5% after controlling for the part-time status of some faculty) in terms of student credit hours (and only 3% of all students taught at the Austin campus), an almost negligible amount compared to the 20% who do the most teaching.

• The 20% of faculty members (that is, 840 out of the 4200 faculty within our sample) with the highest teaching loads carry 57% of the total number of student credit hours taught at the University's (or 55% of the total teaching load if we control for the part-time status of some faculty).

• Further analysis is warranted in terms of the research productivity of faculty, especially to determine the extent to which research productivity and teaching productivity present a tradeoff in terms of faculty time and resources (in other words, further analysis is needed to determine how much-or even if-increases in faculty teaching loads will actually lead to a decrease in the amount of externally funded research faculty perform).

• Interestingly enough, this figure of 852 ―excess‖ faculty is almost exactly equal to the number of faculty who perform only 2% of the teaching, suggesting that if the University released the 840 least productive faculty, there would only be minimal adjustments needed to the teaching loads of remaining faculty.