Shared Responsibility

Responsibility.

Mine,Yours, Ours.

Self-imposed. Taken, given

By default, by decree, by consent, by accident, by design.

For others, for ourselves, for our actions…or inaction.

For our competence…or not

Fix me. Fix you. Fix yourself.

It's not my fault. It’s all your fault or it’s their own fault….

not responsible, non-responsible, irresponsible.

I didn’t realize. I didn’t understand. I never asked for this.

Delegate authority, but never responsibility.

There are relatively few things that a person can do for eight hours a day, every day, day after day.

You can't eat for eight hours a day, you can’t drink for eight hours a day. TV gets boring and no matter what your hobbies are, you can only do so much of that. If you don’t count sleeping, work is about the only thing you can do all day long without getting overly tired, bored, sore, or fat.

I remember my Dad telling me when I was in High School three years ago,  that if I could find a job that I loved, I’d never have to work a day in my life.

Well, when you think about all the other jobs out there that you could be doing, there aren’t very many that are as rewarding or challenging, or just plain better than ours.

We spend so many hours working that I can’t imagine how people that are dissatisfied and miserable at work are able to survive. The way I figure it, during the past 18 years that I’ve spent at a community college, there haven’t been too many days that felt a lot like work.

Speaking of work, I’ve been doing a little with a Project called the Voluntary Framework of Accountability. 

The VFA is working on developing a system designed to measure outcomes and processes that are specific to community colleges so that we can benchmark our student progress and completion data against peers and to provide stakeholders with critical information on the colleges.

Today, nearly all colleges talk about the importance of increasing student retention and many invest significant time and money into programs designed to achieve that end. Some colleges hire consultants who promise a proven formula for successful retention, but for all that time and effort, I haven’t heard many stories of sustained result. Student retention, like so many other competing issues, is one more item to add to the list of issues to be addressed by the institution.

What we end up doing is adopting what Parker Palmer calls the “add a course” strategy. We identify a problem, peruse the data, and design a course whose outcomes are aimed at fixing the problem.  Sometimes we take that one step further and create an “add a program” strategy.

The “add a course” or add a “program strategy” tends to result in student experiences that are increasingly segmented and uncoordinated, subdivided into smaller and smaller pieces until relationships with faculty, staff, and each other become more narrow and specialized and ultimately learning gets partitioned into smaller disconnected segments. It’s hard to prevent this from happening.

But I’m optimistic. I really do believe that we can create our own solutions, by virtue of asking the questions and digging into our on data and past performance.

According to Vincent Tinto, when he was here a few years ago, “most efforts to enhance student retention, though successful to some degree, have had more limited impact than they should or could.”

If we were to take student retention seriously, we would have to stop doing a couple of things:

1. Stop tinkering and 2. Move beyond the provision of add-on services.

We would establish conditions that promote the retention of all, not just some, students.  We have, in fact, shown good progress in affecting the success rates of student enrolling in developmental courses through the activities of the Center for Academic Success.

One might say that the root causes of low retention or a lack of persistence is a problem that is well beyond the sphere of influence in which a college operates -- things like socio-economic status, disenfranchisement, lack of motivation and preparation.

Really, what can we do to impact those things?

In all reality, probably not much, but things like tutoring services, student life, advising and counseling, the writing center, the laboratory, and the classroom -- these are settings that are most definitely within institutional control.

There are places like the conference tables scattered around the M-wing where Math Faculty meet with students during their office hours are likely more effective than the addition of a program or course could be. These are the type of activities we need to consider if we are serious about student retention.

In 1996, a study by John Mohammadi reported an average retention rate for two-year public college students returning the second year as slightly over 50%. The average retention rate for four-year public colleges and universities is 67%.

At Parkland, our overall first-year retention rate during 2008 for full-time students was 68%. For part-time students, the rate was 51%. We sit well above the average found in the study, but still, almost half of students enrolling in credit courses in a given year are not here one year later.

Our overall graduate rate in 2008 was 23%.

Certainly, there’s legitimate reasons behind these numbers, the best of which is that the student’s academic goals have been met. If we look only at first-time, degree seeking students -- presumably students in their first year at Parkland, we lose almost 40% of these students not to graduation or completion of their academic goals.  These students leave for other reasons, like family and job pressures, lack of resources, poor grades, de-motivation, and apathy to name a few. You know the reasons better than I.

More than half of college freshmen in the United States attend community colleges. And, again nearly half of them do not persist past the first year at user-friendly place like a community college.

One of the goals of the working groups I attend is to underscore the importance of these and related issues and to investigate systematic methods we might employ that have a reasonable chance at making an impact, not just another “program” that topically addresses the symptoms.

An emerging issue in the literature is the realization that student enrollment has two major components—initial enrollment and continued enrollment or retention.

The initial enrollment decision is viewed as a discrete process.  A student has to decide to attend college at some point, even if it is three days after classes begin. Once that decision is made, there are a series of large and small ongoing decisions the student has to make: Do I continue to attend college in general, do I stay at this college, do I take 12 or 15 hours, do I choose this program because it has the least amount of Math required, etc.

The student retention decision is continually assessed and updated with the arrival of new information like academic status, grades, and satisfaction with the social life or student peer group, how well he or she gets along with their professors.

These are the factors that the college should be ready to deal with. They are within our sphere of influence. Clearly, all students face the challenges of completing postsecondary education successfully, but most experts in student persistence resist attempts to isolate any one factor as the “leading cause” of attrition among students.

So, after all that,  what’s my point?

Let’s focus on those circumstances affecting retention and success that we have some ability to control and/or affect, including the developmental student, the average student, and the honors student as well.

Presumably, the more comfortable the student feels in a particular social and institutional environment, the greater the degree of loyalty to that institution and hence the more likely the student is to continue at that institution rather than transferring or stopping out.

This “student fit” can be enhanced by the extent to which a student actively participates in student life by joining clubs, and by attendance at athletic events, plays, or lectures, and most important, a connection with an individual or individuals at the college. We call that engagement.

Students who are actively involved in learning, who spend more time on task especially with others, are more likely to learn and, in turn, more likely to stay.

I believe very strongly in the work that is being done by this working group and in the ongoing attention and work at our College toward having a positive impact on the success and retention of our students regardless of their circumstances.

Your efforts, both in the classroom and out, are what make the difference. The truth is that students may or may not remember the material you covered forever, but rest assured they will always remember the way you made them feel.

You are in complete control of that.

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Tips about stuff you already know but occasionally forget

"34% of people surveyed rate their manners as excellent. 80% of people surveyed rate the manners of people in the US as poor"  


-Survey by ORC International


It's amazing and somewhat sad, but in today's world, if you use common courtesy when dealing with your professors, your classmates, and especially prospective employers, you'll more than likely give yourself an edge over the many others who fail to do so.
 
Manners are about showing consideration and using empathy.  But they are also about being connected to a common good; they are about being better.  Respect and consideration are traditionally due to people for all sorts of reasons, some big, some small. 

I realize this seemingly obvious concept is somewhat hard to believe, but it's true. In many ways, we now see so little common courtesy in our respect-starved culture that when we do see it, we're almost stunned by it and most certainly remember it. So as you deal with prospective employers, do the right thing -- and make yourself stand out from the crowd -- by demonstrating your class.

So, what follows are Tom’s tips about stuff you already know but occasionally forget:

At doors

1. Entering or exiting a building: look behind you to see whether anyone else is coming through the same door in the next 5 seconds. If the door will slam in the face of the person behind you, hold it open. 

2. If you see someone right outside and opening the door would involve no more effort than extending your arm, go ahead and give it a push. In particular, let the pizza dude inside, even if it isn’t your pizza. We're lucky to get delivery here.

3. If there are two doors going into a building, and a large number of people are squeezing through one while the other door remains closed, open and go through the unopened door so as to optimize the flow of traffic.

4. If you see someone carrying boxes, ask if there's a door you can open.

5. If you smoke, don't huddle right outside the doors to the building. Nobody wants to walk through a cloud of smoke every time they need to enter or exit. There's been a rule against smoking within 25 feet of a campus building since around 2006, but fear of punishment should not be your sole motivation.

Around campus

1. Say hello to people you meet. If someone else says hello to you, respond in kind. Bonus points for smiling while saying hello. 

2. Say "excuse me" rather than just pushing past people in a crowd or a constricted space. 

3. Wave to, nod, or mouth "thank you" to drivers who stop for you to cross on a pedestrian crossing. It's the law for them to stop, but it's still polite when they do because many don't. Look both ways before you cross the street, even if you're at a crosswalk. 


4. If possible, leave space on the sidewalk so others don't have to walk in water, mud, or snow. If you're walking in a group and one person comes in the opposite direction, move behind someone in your group so the person passing can use the sidewalk as well. And be careful how you maneuver with that umbrella. You almost took my eye out. 

5. If you are innocently walking around campus in a crowd of people and you suddenly see Jack Bauer running after someone and he yells at you to get down, do it. 

In Conversation

1. Don’t interrupt someone while they're talking, no matter how insightful you think what you have to say is. This is one of the rudest things one could do in a conversation, though oftentimes people simply aren't aware that they are guilty of doing it. 

Instead, first make sure they've finished speaking and making their point,  *wait a half-second*, and then go ahead and say what you wanted to say. If you miss your chance because someone else chimed in before you, then oh well, life goes on. What you had to say may not have been as interesting as you think, anyway. 


Online

1. Don't write things in ALL CAPS. or all lowercase, for that matter. Ever. 

2. If you're done using a public computer, close all the windows so people know it's not in use. Log off, unless you want strangers to look through (and potentially modify) your class schedule in my.parkland.edu.

Sustainability

1. If the room is empty, and you're leaving, turn off the lights. Please. 

2. If you go outside to smoke, for crying out loud, throw away your cigarette butts when you're done. Littering is not cool, ever, and this is no exception. 

3. If you have a plastic/glass/aluminum container to toss, but the nearest recycling bin is full, hang onto it until you come to one that isn't full rather than making a pile on top of the bin. The physical plant staff should not have to remove dozens of empty bottles sitting on top of the container before they empty it. 

In class

1. Don't fall asleep in a class. Your professors have put in significant time and effort preparing for class. Nothing could be more disrespectful.

2. When engaged in debate, distinguish between criticisms of your argument and criticisms of your character.
     o Don't make the latter when you're trying to make the former.
     o Don't interpret the former as the latter.


Cell phones

1. Before entering a classroom, a library, a concert, a lecture, a play, or a movie, put your cell phone on vibrate. How about just turn it off or silence it completely? Please.

2. If you are in the library and feel the need to talk to someone on your cellphone, have your conversation in an area where people aren't studying nearby. Also refrain from having loud, long conversations with other people while in the library when people are trying to study around you. 

3. Don't leave your cell phone on a table and then walk away. If it rings or vibrates, it will bother everyone. 

4. If you are in a dark space with others, such as a movie, don't text-message. The light from the screen is bright and very obnoxious. 

Events

1. If you are at a performance of any sort or in the Art Gallery during a lecture, kindly zip it.


2. Do not loudly unwrap throat lozenges in the middle of the music or play. If you have a cough, it's best to unwrap one before the music/play/whatever starts, or during a break in the middle. This can be very hard for someone with say, a cough. Perhaps excusable if you cover your     mouth and try to muffle it. 

3. What seems to be an inconspicuous whisper to you is actually quite loud. 

4. Don't bring small children. 

5. Take off your hat when indoors and during the National Anthem.

6. Did I mention that you should turn off or silence your cell phone?

And finally 20 reasons to show special politeness to other people:

1. They are older.
2. They know more than you do.
3. They know less than you do.
4. They got here first.
5. They have educational qualifications in   the subject under discussion.
6. You are in their house.
7. They once helped you financially.
8. They have been good to you all your life.
9. They are less fortunate than you.
10. They have achieved special status in the wider world.
11. You are serving them in a shop.
12. They are in the right.
13. They are your boss.
14. They work for you.
15. They are a policeman/ teacher/ doctor/judge.
16. They are in need.
17. They are doing you a favor.
18. They paid for the tickets.
19. You phoned them, not the other way around.
20. They have a job that entails service to you.


Please feel free to add your thoughts in the comments.


Thanks.


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Do you know a Chief Underpants Officer?

I heard about a study that was done in Australia (sorry, I can’t remember the source) that predicts that 65% of kids in kindergarten today will be employed in jobs and have job titles that don’t even exist yet. Here is something fun -- some job titles that actually exist today:

How comfortable would you be with a title like Reality Facilitator? Would you apply for a job called Queen for a Day?  Would you even know where to begin? What kind of skills and competencies do you think are required for a Chief Underpants Officer?

Now, think for a second about your favorite twelve-year old kid…a son, daughter, niece, nephew, or neighbor, whatever. How many of you already know a Minister of Comedy, or a Raging, Inexorable Thunder Lizard? I live with one.

And have you heard about this? Ketchup.  

What’s going on with ketchup is kind of important.

In 1869, HJ Heinz started making Ketchup. After 137 years making ketchup, you can assume that the recipe is pretty well perfected. I mean, how much latitude do you really have in a ketchup recipe? Somewhere along the line, other companies started making ketchup too and I would venture to say that their recipes are not appreciably different than the Heinz recipe.

People want ketchup to taste like…ketchup, right? So how do you distinguish, as a consumer, what kind or what brand of ketchup you’re going to buy?

Is it thickness, price or packaging? Packaging.

We are witnessing today, even if you aren’t aware, is massive innovation in the packaging field. These companies are looking at their products and figuring out what they can do differentiate and to innovate. Again, the ketchup recipe -- not a whole lot of latitude, but the container -- oh yeah.

Market share. This is how we can win business from our competitors. How do you add more value to the basic product? Make it safer, healthier, more colorful, lighter, faster, stronger, more durable, ergonomic, accessible, understandable, convenient, student-centered, modular, active, significant, and connected. See what I did there?

Look at what the ketchup company did. They put the cap on the bottom of the container. Now this just makes perfect sense. No more shaking and waiting like the old television commercial and song.

You just hold it there, pop the cap and the ketchup practically falls out onto your burger or corn flakes, or whatever you put ketchup on. Great innovation!

Big deal. It’s just ketchup, right? Let’s put this new ketchup bottle into a generational context.

My Dad is 80. Every time I see him take the ketchup bottle out of the refrigerator, I notice that he stores it with the cap pointing up. And he carries it around with the cap pointing up. After he uses it, he sets it back on the table with the cap pointing up. What’s up with that? It defeats the whole purpose of having the cap on bottom. Come on, Dad!

Now my 16 year old son, on the other hand, he can just deal with it. He naturally goes and takes the bottle and carries it with the cap down. I know there are two possible reasons for this. One, he just doesn't care if that lid pops open accidentally and spills ketchup all over the floor. The reason I prefer is that it’s generational.

Dad is so accustomed to a ketchup bottle that has the lid on the top and it’s so ingrained that he has to work harder to carry it in a way that he thinks is “upside down”. But Colin, because he has to deal with change constantly, adapts in about 7 seconds and will have to keep adapting for his whole life, probably more so than my father did in his lifetime.

Even for Colin, who has seen and used the bottle with the cap on top most of his life, this new package makes complete sense in his mind and his adaptation is immediate. I think a lot of us in between my father and my son’s age have trouble not in accepting an innovation, but incorporating the innovation into our thinking -- into our subconscious where it lives.

It’s all about packaging.

Who are the people that walk through our hallways and sit in your classrooms?

Well, 62.5% them will have been born right around 1990, give or take 3 years. They are expert multi-taskers, “hypertext minds” and fluent with cutting-edge, network-based communication tools. And by the way, those tools aren’t computers anymore.

They are cell phones and the playing field includes text messages, GPS, digital music, movies and pictures. If they don’t know something, big deal. The answer is only a few keystrokes away.

The classic community college mission of access is illustrated in technological terms on our campuses every day. Our students expect robust bandwidth to power their netbooks, iPhones and iPads, and laptops. iMamazed.

They expect wireless signals (both Internet and cellular and near good coffee) to reach into every nook and corner of the college. They expect far more than a simple syllabus with the email address of the professor. At Parkland, significant investment in both faculty development, course re-design, and the required support systems began fifteen years ago.

Administration, at the time, wisely invested resources into the creation of one of the first student and course management portals and engaged faculty in the selection and management of hardware and software. Today, the vast majority of the sections we offer blur the lines between traditional on-campus courses and those labeled as online or hybrid sections.

Our online students now make up well over 10% of all enrollments at Parkland. Last spring, over 5000 seats in online courses were filled. If you saw the article about our online courses in the News Gazette a while back,  you know that the reason they come is because we do this with our hands:

So, our faculty and staff have grown accustomed to electronic class rosters with student pictures and email addresses, automatic population of the learning management system, online grading, and the ability to generate a multitude of reports on-the-fly.

Our students insist upon networked access to their class schedule, financial aid portfolio, degree audit systems, and “live chat” with student services professionals, even at 1 am. Especially at 1 am. Packaging…

We attract students from all over the country as well as concurrently enrolled students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, just five miles away. Access and convenience in conjunction with quality and transferability are imperatives.

My point is that awareness and understanding of what might be important to our students and consideration of the differences in the ways we acquire and process information and construct knowledge…is not only important, its critical. 

As these devices become inextricably linked to our lives, our families, our friends, and our students, not only in this country, but around the world, we are connected like never before.

I was at a wedding a while back, and I met up with two of my nieces (16 and 19 years old) that I haven’t seen in quite a while. All the time we were at this very admittedly boring wedding reception, they were glued to their cell phones, but they didn’t have them up to their ear like you might expect.

They had them in front of them, their faces softly lit by the glow of the high resolution, thin film transistor color screen with built-in 5.2 megapixel camera and 270 hours of battery life and 3D graphics engine, while their thumbs were moving at 100 miles an hour over the keypad as they composed text messages to their friends back home in Michigan.

I guess that old-fashioned email system just isn’t fast enough anymore.

So yes, now it’s possible for even the most insulated of Americans to keep in touch and even have friends from all over the world. For instance, I recently received an e-mail asking me to help a deposed Nigerian prince who is looking for a business partner to recapture his fortune.

Thanks to the flexibility of global banking, a Swiss bank account is ready and waiting for my share of his money. I know, because I just e-mailed him my Social Security number.

And pharmaceuticals! I’m getting emails on a daily basis from people I have never met that somehow say they know that I need all kinds of drugs for conditions that I didn’t even know I had. Talk about amazing!

Our students are changing and so is the College.  

Today, we speak in terms of terabyte storage when it seems like just last semester it was merely gigabytes. Yet at the very same time, employers in the community college districts that we serve lament the very real deficits in our graduate’s ability to communicate effectively, work in teams, and think critically.

It seems as though we, in the community college especially, are squeezed between the dichotomy of understanding this rapid change with respect to curriculum, equipment, and labs, while watching our students stumble over the very basic work ethic skills instilled by our parents a generation before. What happens to our Raging, Inexorable Thunder Lizard Evangelists along the way?

We need not be futurists to come to the conclusion that the whole endeavor of higher education has been forever changed by these forces – jobs, technology, etc.

As our systems evolve and students’ expectations around access drive us, likewise, their insatiable appetite for quick and easy access to information drives our system designs. 

Today, I am sure of one thing: change is constant and its rate is accelerating exponentially. 

Hang on!


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Construction Update – September, 2009

A few projects happening on campus...

Master Plan Phase I

Diesel Technology Addition –This project is an addition to the Tony Noel Agricultural Technology Center.  This addition will be approximately 17,000 SF and will be attached to the south side of the existing Tony Noel facility.  The floors, steel structure of walls and roof are complete, interior systems are being installed.  Several building components have not been delivered to the site and substantial completion of the project has been delayed until the end of September.

Applied Technology Center (ATC) – This new construction is approximately 64,000 SF and is being partially funded by the State of Illinois through the Capital Development Board.  The facility will house the comprehensive Automotive Programs, Ford Asset, Collision Repair, Industrial Technology, and Welding.  Construction plans and documents are complete.  The Capital Development Board received bids for Mechanical contractors on August 26^th and General contractors on September 2^nd, 2010.   The bids are currently being reviewed by the College Administration and the Capital Development Board and are scheduled to be presented to the Board for approval at the October Board meeting.  The intent is to have the facility ready for classes in spring 2012

Elevator Upgrades –Upgrade work on elevators for the lower X Wing to the Library, B Wing, C Wing, College Center, P Wing, L Wing, and X Wing near the Book Store have been completed.  The only remaining elevator to be upgraded is the A Wing elevator.   Parts for that elevator are anticipated to be delivered in mid October with completion in mid November.

Roof Repairs –Final work on the roofs in A and X wings is progressing.  Work on the flat roofs are complete and metal edge detail work is underway.  The second phase of Roof Repairs is currently in design with re-roofing for the M, L and P wings to begin in May of 2011.

 

 Wing Remodeling –The C Wing trim work is continuing and glass wall partitions have been installed for department offices in the C Wing.  New lounge furniture has arrived for the C Wing and is being installed.

Master Plan Phase II

Student Services Center – This project is approximately 80,000 SF of new space that will house all student service functions, including additional student lounge and food service space.   Perkins and Will have been selected as the lead architect for the Student Services Center project.  Programmatic design has been completed and the user groups, Administration and the Capital Development Board are reviewing the plan.  The State of Illinois has released $2,000,000 of appropriated funding for this project which will be used for fees for the design of the new facility and for construction documents.  The Capital Development Board and architects Perkins and Will are currently in fee negotiations for the design and construction documents phase of the project.

Fitness Center - The College has been investigating the option of constructing a new Fitness Center adjacent to the gym as a separate project apart from the Student Services Center.  Included in this project would be the remodeling of the lower level of the gymnasium.  The completion of this project would give the College a new "state of the art" athletic facility with space for Kinesiology, dance and aerobics, strength training, an indoor walking track, new locker rooms and team rooms, and coach’s offices.  A group of administrators and faculty are working with architect Wil Helmick on programmatic design and project costs.

IT Sever Room Upgrade - This project is to improve the Campus computer room environment and support systems.  The current computer room is located in the second floor of the D Wing.  A new Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS) will be installed along with a larger, stand-alone air conditioning system in the computer room.  New electrical wiring for these systems and the installation of a natural gas-fired back up emergency electrical generator will provide electrical and support systems to keep the Campus computers operational should the main electrical supply fail.  The UPS system and the emergency generator have been installed and are on-line and functioning.  The new air conditioning system is nearing completion.

PHS Drainage Improvements – Phase X –This phase includes relocating the Duncan Road entrance to campus to the southwest side of campus.  Included in this summer’s work is substantial drainage work to ensure that the west sides of the campus and the areas for new construction (Diesel Power Addition and Applied Technology Center) have proper rainwater flow and detention.  The project was substantially completed in mid August.

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