On September 14th, we held a small reception on campus to celebrate the faculty who completed the ACUE online teaching program. This was our first cohort of faculty to go through the program, which provides structured support to learn about effective online teaching practices. The cohort included a mix of full- and part-time faculty, and we had excellent participation by our incoming first-year faculty. Chris Garrett (CTLE Director) was our campus facilitator for the program.

Each faculty member who completed the program earns a certificate. At the reception, Chris Garrett distributed ACUE pins to those who finished the full program. We were delighted to recognize these faculty for their participation and for earning this prestigious credential. While we aren't a large enough institution to take part every year, we hope to enroll a cohort every other year so additional faculty have the opportunity to benefit.

If you’re sitting there thinking, “Gosh, Tony, your work sounds fascinating; it’s like being a special agent in one of those action movies, except instead of disarming a bomb, your missions involve things like ‘upholding accreditation standards’ and ‘improving IPEDs retention rates,’” well, first, you’re right. But second, and before you become envious, I should point out that I spent a decent portion of the past two weeks talking to people about the logistics of the vaccine mandate. Fun. This includes the unparalleled excitement of discussing the enforcement of online enrollment for unvaccinated students, the recently released exemption forms, and, my personal favorite, the routine testing for students who receive an exemption. Necessary. Important. But not always scintillating.

To be fair, I’ve had my share of excitement as well. One of our major endeavors in recent months has involved the pursuit of an excellent first-year student recruitment “season” after an admittedly tough run during the height of the pandemic. This work has involved everything from the development of an entirely new recruitment presentation (in conjunction with marketing), to the meticulous assessment of how we handle student inquiries along the enrollment journey, to a refocusing of our recruitment efforts involving dual credit students. It also involves a heavy emphasis on things we simply could not do last fall, such as give face-to-face presentations in high schools and bring prospective students to campus for a tour of our dynamic campus (a nice complement to the Virtual Tour we created last year). In a similar arena, we also have been coordinating an enrollment push for the winter/spring semesters (which I’ll discuss in a future update, if only to let the suspense sizzle a little longer).

Finally, this is one of those times when NSHE comes knocking for a round of annual reports. In answering their call, we recently submitted our new program follow-up report (simple, consisting mostly of our enrollment data), our existing program review report (the calm before the storm), and our annual low yield reports (where our faculty did all of the heavy lifting to piece these together).