From Discussion to Action: Unifying the Undergraduate Experience 10th Annual Undergraduate Experiences Symposium 1. National Context From Discussion to Action: Unifying the Undergraduate Experience [This slide is on screen as participants come in, and possibly during the call to order and welcome from CU Denver leadership.] End with toss to Ken. Ken: Thanks for joining us. As the day goes along we’ll focus pretty narrowly on what steps you want to take in the immediate future, and making this move from [click] discussion to action. But for now we’ll ask you to zoom out to the [click] national context, beginning even further back in fact, to consider the path we’ve been on in higher education for last eight or nine -- From Discussion to Action: Unifying the Undergraduate Experience Greg Cook, University of Wisconsin Whitewater Ken O’Donnell, California State University

ballooning enrollment agriculture business engineering teaching right here right now ballooning enrollment 1880s Germany almost everything almost everyone law medicine theology 1100s Bologna -- hundred years. This is one of Europe’s first universities, from the end of the twelfth century. I look at this and notice a few things. There’s the speaker’s turban, that Arab influence on learning. The layout of the classroom, assuming that the knowledge is all on one side, and the point is to transmit it. And there’s the [click] predictable impact of this approach on student engagement. A lot of that is [click] still in place, but a lot has also changed. Think about curriculum. At that time you went to college to enter one of only [click] three professions. Right? Now I’m going to skip over much of the intervening time, and go straight to the [click] infection point I think is significant next. The world is more complicated, especially in a range of subjects that universities [click] add as a reflection of their growing complexity. If you think about it, that range of subjects – seven of them – still represents most of what we do. Yet the world hasn’t been standing still since then, and when you get to [click] the here and now, it’s harder to think of jobs where you [click] don’t need college. But that’s not all. Growing in the background, especially in the last 150 years, is the [click] number of students we serve. Looked at this way, I think it’s a safe bet where [click] higher education is going. We’ll need to [click] teach almost everything to almost everyone. I’ll get to the “almost everything” in a moment, but first, the -- almost everything

almost everyone enrollment rates of 18- to 24-year-olds in degree-granting institutions 1970 top 26% Source: National Center for Education Statistics 2009 top 41% enrollment by Hispanics, African-Americans, and Asians: 15% 19% 34% 1990 2009 1976 [Sources: Charles Clotfelter, “Financial Aid and Public Policy,” in Economic Challenges in Higher Education, 1991, for first two periods of financial aid data; all other data points are from the National Center for Education Statistics.] -- almost everyone. Here’s how much of the [click] traditionally college-aged population comes to college. In 1970, we [click] enrolled about a quarter of them. Over the next [click] forty years, you see that portion growing, and behind the scenes, it was the publics like the community colleges and the CSU and CU Denver making it possible. We’ve added fifteen percentage points – that is, taking in more than half again as many students as we had before. And here’s the good news. They’re getting more diverse. You can define diversity in a few different ways, and I’ll start with some [click] obvious ones. In 1976, only [click] 15% of our students were ethnic minority. Over time, we see that portion growing, to the way we look now. Another kind of diversity is [click] socioeconomic, and here too the news is very good. In [click] 1976 fewer than a third of our students qualified for financial aid, and that, too, has been changing over time, and in the direction we want. We could go into other kinds of diversification, too, such as whether the family has a college-going tradition, or how well prepared the student is academically. To me, all of those are surface indications of something deeper that you probably notice if you’ve been teaching for a while. There’s a wider range of people in the room now, as we’ve reached deeper down into the general population, and loosened the monopolistic grip of the elites. This is very good news, but unfortunately these gains haven’t been met with commensurate progress in degree production. Because all these newcomers, however welcome we make them feel, face the same challenges as our other students as we try to educate almost everyone. And that is our unacceptably low -- enrollment by students eligible for financial aid: 30% 46% 66% 2009 1976 1990

almost everything almost everyone 42.7% -4.1% 55.9% -11.9% 51.6% -7.0% six-year graduation rate Latino six-year graduation rate 42.7% 2006 2005 -4.1% 2004 2003 2006 55.9% 2005 -11.9% 2004 [Sources: College Results Online for UWW and CU Denver; CSU Analytic Studies (calstate.edu/as) for CSU systemwide. CSU reports identify cohorts by starting term, whereas the CRO site identifies grad rates by year of completion. So six-year rates for the 2003 cohort on the CSU page are compared here with six-year rates as of 2009 on the CRO page. Hover your pointer over each bar to see its exact value.] -- six-year graduation rates. Get ready for some dirty laundry, and I’ll start with [click] ours in California. This is [click] rolled up across our 23 universities, and if you take the upper bar in each pairing, you get our overall six-year rate for that year, as we reported it to the U.S. Department of Education. Those four numbers average to [click] 51.6%. The shorter, lower bar in each pair is the same rate but for only our [click] Latino students. You’ll see it’s lower, on average by [click] seven percentage points. Not where we want to be, by any measure. Now let’s look at Greg’s institution, the [click] University of Wisconsin at Whitewater. This is the same source, IPEDS data as [click] submitted to the DoE. You see that overall the rate is [click] noticeably higher, but you may also notice a [click] bigger gap. In Wisconsin’s defense, a lot of the publics all around the state are working on this, and it’s frankly harder to close gaps when your minority population is small. In California we don’t have that problem. (Note also these numbers are slightly different from what you see in the handout, owing to difference in methodology.) Now let’s look at [click] you. The story here is [click] mixed. You generally appear to have smaller gaps, which is good, but a lower overall rate than we’d want to see. When you look at exact numbers that’s [click] borne out, [click] both ways. What does that tell you? [Lead a discussion here, to the extent there’s time and interest.] The point here is that we get – and deserve, a lot of credit for the welcome we extend to students of all backgrounds. But genuine access means not just to the campus, but also to the degree. When we manage that, we’ll come closer to our emerging goal of teaching [click] almost everyone. Hard job. What about teaching them [click] almost everything? Also hard. And getting -- 2003 2006 51.6% 2005 -7.0% 2004 2003

almost everything 2018 45% 1973 1973 28% 28% 89% portion of U.S. jobs requiring at least a two-year degree 2018 45% Source: Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce coordination complexity rising expectations of employers “Organizations are looking for employees to use a broader set of skills and have higher levels of learning and knowledge than in the past.” “Organizations are looking for employees to use a broader set of skills and have higher levels of learning and knowledge than in the past.” “Organizations are looking for employees to use a broader set of skills and have higher levels of learning and knowledge than in the past.” 1973 28% 1973 28% Jobs have become more intellectually demanding. -- harder. As recently as [click] 1973 it was around a quarter of jobs that required as associate degree or higher. It’s projected that in the next three or four years, that will have risen to [click] nearly half. And we’re not talking about just any degrees. Our employers keep [click] wanting more from the ones we make. Periodically the AAC&U commissions surveys from Peter Hart Research Associates, to get at the kind of learning expected of college graduates. You can see in the summary of the last one that [click] almost universally, they wanted the kind of academic rigor that most of us find exciting. They asked four questions in particular: will employees need a [click] “broader set of skills,” need to work harder to [click] “coordinate with other departments,” face [click] “more complex challenges,” and need [click] “higher levels of learning and knowledge.” Employers answered yes to each of the four, within a narrow range from [click] 88 to 91%. Now, it’s easy to dismiss this kind of wishlist – when asked a question like this, is anyone really going to say “no thank you, I don’t want more of the good stuff?” But are they willing to pay more for it? Increasingly, the answer is yes. 89% Source: Raising the Bar, Hart Research Associates

almost everything 81% 78% 66% 59% 49% 48% 37% wage premium for skilled labor 81% 78% 66% 59% 49% 48% 37% The “wage premium” is how much more employers are willing to pay people who hold at least an associate degree. [For these purposes, “skilled” are workers with associate degrees or higher; “unskilled” is everyone else. By this methodology, those reporting “some college” are divided, half of them in the skilled group and the other unskilled.] In 1950, that premium [click] was 37%. Pretty much for [click] every decade since, the premium has been rising. We had a lot of baby boomers graduate around 1980, briefly flooding the employment market, but aside from that the trend is clear. You can say that’s a good thing, but the -- [Source: Goldin and Katz (2008), as cited in Carnevale, “The Undereducated American.”] 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010

almost everything relative change in supply and demand since 1970 wage premium for skilled labor demand 2% average annual growth 1.5% average annual growth Claudia Goldin Lawrence Katz Harvard University 81% 81% -- Harvard economists who [click] did this study say it’s not. They say this premium has been responsible for the country’s widening income disparities. [credit for photo of two economists: Frank Curran, Commonwealth Magazine] And they use this growing wage premium plus other evidence to get very precise about the [click] gap between supply and demand, using the year 1970 as a baseline. Since then we’ve seen [click] demand for college educated employees grow, first a lot and then leveling off, but on average by about 2% per year, compounding. During that same period, higher education’s production of graduates, relative to 1970, has been around [click] 1.5% a year, also compounding over time, to produce the current and [click] persistent gap. Hence, they say, the growth in the [click] wage premium. And remember, it’s not enough for these people that we make more degrees. They’re also supposed to be [click] better ones. I don’t want to present this as if the case is closed – it’s not, and some economists just as illustrious as these say we have plenty of graduates running around, and point to unemployment and underemployment as evidence. But they’re in the minority, and if we think about how the world in general, and work in particular, have been evolving, then we can say that this interpretation is not only the prevailing one, but it also passes the smell test. I have one more point to make about our moment in history, before coming back to the subject of the day, and educational integration. This has to do with -- 89% wage premium for skilled labor

David Autor MIT David Dorn Madrid “Computerization has boosted demand for workers who perform “non-routine” tasks that complement the automated activities. “At one end are so-called abstract tasks that require problem-solving, intuition, persuasion and creativity. “On the other end are so-called manual tasks. Preparing a meal, driving a truck through city traffic or cleaning a hotel room present mind-bogglingly complex challenges for computers.” “Computerization has boosted demand for workers who perform “non-routine” tasks that complement the automated activities. “At one end are so-called abstract tasks that require problem-solving, intuition, persuasion and creativity. “On the other end are so-called manual tasks. Preparing a meal, driving a truck through city traffic or cleaning a hotel room present mind-bogglingly complex challenges for computers.” David Dorn Madrid -- a scary fork in the road that our students will face, as explained in an article by [click] these two [click] guys in the New York Times last summer. They’re [click] talking about how work has changed in the face of encroaching automation, and say [click] this. [Let people read, then two more clicks.] You get it? Automation takes out the jobs in the middle, and of the two ends that are left you want to make sure you get to the [click] higher one. How do you do that as a student? Putting it another way, what do we as educators need to emphasize? For the answer I like quoting --

The new kind of work will reward those who master: design story symphony empathy play meaning -- Daniel Pink, a psychologist and consultant. He’s written a few bestsellers you may have heard of or read. This is from one of his [click] early ones. He begins with [click] the same point about automation and outsourcing that the two Davids made. Then he gives us his [click] recipe for success in that context. There are six [click six times] attributes he identifies as the human, cultural, personal contributions we make to our work, things that can’t be exported, automated, or outsourced, that make it meaningful, playful, and marketable. Now notice, he’s NOT saying these are the skills you’ll need to be an entertainer, or an artist, or a visionary captain of industry. This is just work. The jobs that are left when you focus on what a robot can’t do. This is what college can help our students develop, the toolkit to be immune to automation and outsourcing, no matter what they major in. But in figuring out how to build that into what we teach and what we communicate about its value, we face some serious constraints in the systems we -- “Globalization is shipping white-collar work overseas, and powerful technologies are eliminating certain kinds of work altogether.”

[Harbor Freeway, 1959. image credit: Water and Power Associates] -- inherited. Imagine how we look to students experiencing higher education for the first time. This picture of Los Angeles was taken shortly after the interstate highway bill and the GI Bill, and the year before the CSU became a system, and when universities like yours, mine, and Greg’s were just coming into their own. A visitor who’d missed that decade or two of explosive growth might wonder what on earth was going on. These are roads that don’t seem to lead anywhere, except to other roads. The codes aren’t [click] self-evident, and reflect historical and jurisdictional layers that don’t matter to the driver. If you know the language you can see who funded it, how long ago, and why, but the driver doesn’t care about any of that. You just need to know what to do. I think that’s how college looks to outsiders, and newcomers. So getting them to stay means helping them see what we probably saw when we were students: why we should want to. In other words, it means clarifying our purpose. One of the handouts in your folder does as good a job of that as I’ve seen, and it’s the [click] LEAP Essential Learning Outcomes. We liked them so much in the CSU that we adopted them verbatim in one of our policy documents. They are vastly better than our legacy road signs, and I encourage you to think of them as you look for ways to integrate curriculum. And while we’re at it, we should shift the focus toward ways --

-- students really learn -- students really learn. Much of what they learn comes from outside of the classroom, on their own. Or [click] in their interactions with the community in service learning experiences, or [click] from each other, via peer mentoring, or in [click] internships, or first-year experiences and learning communities, by collaborating with faculty on their [click] research. These are the settings the AAC&U calls high-impact practices, and they’re also listed among your handouts. What’s important isn’t so much what’s on the list as what they have in common. In these activities, the only way a student gets through is by teamwork, by pulling toward a shared goal, by solving problems on the fly. These are what prepare students for their own lives as adults, instead of their grandparents’ lives. And the students know it. You put them into this kind of education, and the grad rates rise, and the gaps shrink. No kidding. This is from --

Graduation Rates by Ethnicity and participation in High-Impact Practices Source: CSU Northridge Institutional Research August, 2010 68% 65% 63% 55% 49% 38% -- research at CSUN, looking at six-year graduation rates as we did a moment ago with yours. For our Northridge campus the key ethnic distinction is between Latino and not, so we’ll [click] look at that. The rates are [click] not good, with a 17-point gap. Comparable to what you saw for our whole system. What their IR director did from there is interesting. Controlling for other predictors of student success, like eligibility for financial aid, parents’ educational attainment, and high school academic records, she looked at the change in graduation rates for those who reported on the NSSE that they’d participated in one high-impact practice. And what she found is that [click] the rates went up, noticeably. The gap is even starting to close, to 14 points. Here’s what she found when students reported participating in [click] two. For one student that might be a learning community and an internship; for another it might be undergraduate research and first-year experience. And the gap is down to three points. So, pointing toward outcomes, and incorporating high-impact practices. Those have been our two main strategies in California for building the kind of integrated, student focused education that you’re developing here. They represent our response to the -- 1 2 1 2 Latino/a not Latino/a

2. CU Denver Vision for Learning 1. National Context 2. CU Denver Vision for Learning -- national context all of us face, one where college is more important than ever, and where an increasingly diverse population adds urgency to our efforts to give everyone an equitable shot at success. Later today I’ll be letting you know how those efforts have come along. But first, we want to get your take on [click] where CU Denver sees itself heading. [This stays up during the facilitated discussions and then [click] during the group work at the tables.] From Discussion to Action: Unifying the Undergraduate Experience

Ken visited UW-Whitewater Inspired us to dig deeper into our LEAP work . . .

Beneficial as a comprehensive framework UW-Whitewater adopted the LEAP Essential Learning Outcomes: whole cloth Beneficial as a comprehensive framework Break down silos Facilitate communication and collaboration Enhance the quality of undergraduate education

Using LEAP tools to explore the CU Denver Vision for Integrative Learning Essential Learning Outcomes Principles of Excellence Connections to your campus initiative on Integrative Learning?

High-Impact Educational Practices Connections to Integrative Learning?

Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education VALUE Rubrics Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education

Connections to Integrative Learning? Inclusive Excellence “Through LEAP, AAC&U calls on the United States to ‘make excellence inclusive’ so that all students receive the best and most powerful preparation for work, life and citizenship.” -http://aacu.org/leap Connections to Integrative Learning?

What is America’s Promise? What promise does U.S. higher education represent? What promise does CU Denver represent? Table discussion, . . . . . then share out.

Do we have a record of keeping our promises? UW-Whitewater handout: 25.6 percentage point gap in 6-year graduation rate between African American students and the general student population. Do we promise a real opportunity for success?

6-Year Graduation Rates Be HIP: Get a JOB! On-Campus Employment (OCE): 2006-2007 cohorts 6-Year Graduation Rates 79 GAP +33 57 GAP +11 GAP +11 46 Gap -20 Gap -20 26 ALL STUDENTS Not in OCE URM Not in OCE URM In OCE ALL STUDENTS In OCE

Integrative Learning and LEAP Quality of Teaching and Learning Retention Success Graduation Jobs and quality of life

Integrative Learning in Practice Mark Gelernter Dean, College of Architecture and Planning Dawn Gregg Associate Dean, Business School Bruce Janson Associate Dean, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences Pamela Jansma Dean, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Rebecca Kantor Dean, School of Education and Human Development Paul Teske Dean, School of Public Affairs [Keep this slide up during panel discussion, ideally with the names of the panelists to make it easier to direct questions to particular people.] From Discussion to Action: Unifying the Undergraduate Experience

From Discussion to Action: Unifying the Undergraduate Experience Lunch Activity: What can you and your tablemates do to learn and engage more with LEAP and the CU-Denver initiative on Integrative Learning? Each table: create a poster describing your plans See instructions at each table. [This slide appears as we transition to lunch. Greg will explain the lunch activity—asking each table to hold discussions and create a poster] From Discussion to Action: Unifying the Undergraduate Experience

6. One-Year Horizon (state level) Okay, thanks for doing all that work, and for committing to poster paper some of your best thinking about where the university should go. This takes a lot of time and effort, but there’s really no substitute for it. I especially would like to thank the leadership of your academic affairs division, John, Rod, and Jeff, for putting this event together. I have to say, this is what shared governance and collegiality look like. For the second half of the day we’re going to shift gears and get very specific about what you want to take on in the year ahead. Be ambitious, but realistic. And be specific, so everyone knows what you’re aiming for and whether you hit it. To that end, I’m going to share with you how we’re doing in the California State University on the student engagement efforts I described earlier, centered on a shift of focus to learning outcomes, and better incorporation of high-impact practices. First the shift to learning outcomes. To understand the shift you need to know first what we’re getting away from, and that’s -- From Discussion to Action: Unifying the Undergraduate Experience

General Education Certification English Communication A Math & Quantitative Reasoning B4 Arts & Humanities C Social Science D Science (including lab) B1-3 Self-Development E -- the traditional classroom approach, and the way it’s reflected in general education. California’s transfer curriculum is impressive in many ways, but showing its age. A key feature is that it authorizes community colleges to [click] “certify” a student as having completed GE before transfer. After that, the CSU can’t make the student take any further GE in the lower division. We pull the trick off by [click] dividing GE into familiar areas of course content and skills, and assigning an alphanumeric code to each. Community college catalogs and web sites use the same codes, so students can see how classes will count. It’s good, but it’s a little like those outdated freeway signs. A better approach would be to present this part of the degree not in terms of disconnected requirements to meet, but instead in terms of the learning it’s meant to develop. We took a first step in this direction through the CSU --

LEAP Essential Learning Outcomes CSU Chancellor’s General Education Advisory Group 2007-2008 revision of Executive Order on GE Breadth Article 1 Applicability Article 2 Pathways to Meet Requirements Article 3 Premises Article 4 Distribution of Units Article 5 Transfer and Articulation Article 6 Implementation and Governance Article 1 Applicability Article 2 Pathways to Meet Requirements Article 3 Premises Article 4 Distribution of Units Article 5 Transfer and Articulation Article 6 Implementation and Governance LEAP Essential Learning Outcomes -- Chancellor’s General Education Advisory Group. This is the mostly-faculty group charged with oversight of the key curriculum and policy. It includes representation from community college faculty, and administrators and articulation officers from both segments. About [click] seven years ago it reconsidered our executive order on the GE transfer curriculum, taking language from the old one and putting it into [click] a more intuitive sequence. Significantly, the committee also revisited the [click] premises, and recommended we explicitly cite [click] the AAC&U’s LEAP Essential Learning Outcomes, and the faculty senate and chancellor agreed. You have those outcomes verbatim in front of you. In the executive order, we paraphrase them --

CSU GE Breadth certification -- like this. Our new focus on outcomes should help us pry ourselves out of the current, constricted paradigm. Imagine how that would feel to a student, whether at the community colleges or CSU, if instead of the checklist of thirteen courses, you [click] had these [click] four proficiencies [click] to develop as you prepare for [click] upper-division work. You’d stop asking “why do I have to take this course,” because the reason is written into the requirement. Faculty at the colleges and universities could agree on a [click] threshold level of attainment for the four, and as students [click] accumulate educational experiences, they’d develop proficiency on each axis. When they’ve hit the benchmark on all four, they’re [click] GE certified. In the time since then, we’ve raised grant money and tirelessly barnstormed around the state, to get our state universities and community colleges to give it a whirl. Here’s how one is doing it, our community college in --

written communication quantitative reasoning critical thinking oral communication written communication quantitative reasoning critical thinking cohort-based learning community peer mentoring off-campus learning lifelong learning physical science arts or humanities social science -- Santa Barbara. As they thought about how to prepare students for transfer in ways that took better advantage of what the college offers, they began with what we in the CSU call the [click] Golden Four. These are the essential skills that we’ve seen students need to succeed in upper division work, and so we make them a requirement for transfer admission. After that, our GE transfer package adds the usual [click] content areas. The sciences, and arts and humanities, and three courses in the social sciences. We finish off the package with an area called [click] Lifelong learning. What Santa Barbara did was ask, “what if students could take some of that oral communication, and learn it in the [click] context of [click] some of the other [click] areas? It isn’t going away, it just isn’t in isolation anymore. The same professor teaches it, and coaches colleagues on embedding it into other coursework. Calculations of faculty load are the same. And then, they did the same thing with Area E, Lifelong learning, embedding its educational outcomes into other, more content-driven coursework. And with the space that’s freed up, the college puts students into a [click] cohort driven learning community, embedding multiple high-impact practices. This is hard. You can see the details -- life science arts or humanities social science science laboratory arts or humanities social science

calstate.edu/app/geac -- here, at the web site for that same GE committee, which approved the pilot last year. It’s one of [click] several [click] pilots the committee is monitoring, and the proposal is posted verbatim. But it’s hard. After seven years of permission and encouragement, I would have liked to harvest more examples to share. So on the scale of examples showing what you can do in a year, I’d put this at one extreme. Part of what makes it slow: there’s money involved, it’s a big break from a longstanding structure, and there’s no legal imperative to proceed. Contrast that with my next example, the breakneck one. You remember when earlier I shared with you --

problems with HIPs data: students self-report it on NSSE if it’s true, then build it into: faculty load facilities allocation degree requirements -- these states on high-impact practices? Imaging for a second if we took these stats at face value, what the world would look like. If this were really [click] true, then the extra work HIPs require from faculty would be [click] additionally compensated. Similarly, we would decide these are so worth it that they get preferred allocations of other institutional resources, like [click] classrooms and labs. And, because we know some of the students likeliest to benefit are also the ones least likely to opt in, we would make these [click] required for degree completion. A few campuses in the CSU are starting to do this, and many smaller and private institutions have been for years. But in the policy world that I inhabit, we don’t consider adoption to be serious until it happens at enormous public scale, and we aren’t there yet. Why not? Well, because there are a couple of weaknesses with this data. You may already have thought of one, selection bias. People usually do. Didn’t I just say the kids who opt in are the go-getters? Well then, wouldn’t they have graduated anyway? Well, maybe, but when you control for the other risk factors the way this study does, you can minimize that effect, if not quite eliminate it. Really, to shore up that weakness our only hope is do what we’re doing: keep studying it, until the weight of certainty tips and we’re ready to say not just correlation, but causality. In the meantime, there are a couple of other problems with the [click] HIPs data that we can start working on right away. First, it’s all [click] self-reported on the National Survey of Student Engagement, something students take when they’re about to graduate. Think about that for a second: it’s six or seven years after you started, you’re hung over, you just want to leave. Are you going to remember what you did back then? Was it even called a learning community? Second, if they students’ nomenclature is inconsistent, well -- problems with HIPs data: students self-report it on NSSE

if it’s true, then build it into: faculty load facilities allocation degree requirements participated in first-year-experience completed freshman math Can we define high-impact practices so unambiguously that a registrar would be confident saying whether or not a student participated in one? -- so is ours. You just can’t find decent, stable definitions of these practices, and so they defy rigorous, actionable analysis. No two people mean the same thing. We’re working on this [click] now, in a couple of ways. And on this, the progress in a year has been remarkable. First, we asked the [click] recipients to submit [click] enrollment data on all the students who opt in. In other words, no more self-reporting, and we think that will tackle the [click] first problem. That leaves the [click] second one, and the question of what we really mean. Here’s how we [click] think of it. We want the answer to be yes. Because on that day, we’ll be able to feed reliable data into tools like our [click] Student Success Dashboard, and say not just, “look what happens when they complete [click] freshman math,” but also, “look what happens when they [click] participate in first-year experience.” So there’s an order of operations here, as we make our case. Before anything else, we need --

-- clearly defined inputs. What are and are not high-impact practices -- clearly defined inputs. What are and are not high-impact practices? Who was in and who wasn’t? After [click] that, we should be able to [click] shore up the study from Northridge with more like it. A lot of campuses have been doing this on their own, in California and out, but we think it’ll be stronger if we can make a concerted effort. And as I said, demonstrating graduation rates is just the intermediate step. In the long run, we’re not about the persistence but about the [click] learning, and the sooner we can get serious about building that into our business model, the better. So one accelerator of change over the past year has been high-level financial and policy support from the chancellor, which reflected pervasive sentiment among staff and faculty. There’s another accelerator of change around this, and it’s that a whole lot of --

-- powerful people are asking us to get more transparent about the value of what we provide, and what it [click] costs to provide it. The president is one, but so are armies of policy makers and researchers, and [click] accreditors. By now they all suspect that MOOCs aren’t the answer, but none of them know how to promote or recognize the kind of full-spectrum learning that comes with college. We want to get in front of that need, and the time is now. So a tale of two engagement efforts here, as we ask --

5. One-Year Horizon (state level) -- how one-year horizons look at the state level. On the HIPs tracking work we’re in good shape, better than I would have predicted a year ago. We have published taxonomies of the big ones, with more refinement to come, and we’re building the reporting tools into our dashboard. But on overturning the [click] lecture and credit-hour model of transfer and GE, progress has been much slower. There’s less money, less policy pressure, and – frankly – less consensus in the field. On that note, I’ll turn things over to -- From Discussion to Action: Unifying the Undergraduate Experience

7. One-Year Horizon (university level) -- Greg, for a consideration of one-year efforts at the level you most need to know about, the individual campus. Greg? From Discussion to Action: Unifying the Undergraduate Experience

One University’s Journey to LEAP: University of Wisconsin-Whitewater UW System asked campuses to define baccalaureate learning outcomes UW-Whitewater formed a BLT (2009-2010) Recommended LEAP ELOs Endorsed by campus governance groups (Spring 2010) Now what? What if nothing happens or changes? What does it look like to implement LEAP/ELOs?

Team to AAC&U Summer Institute (Summer 2010) Learned about LEAP Defined goals & milestones: “What should our campus accomplish/do over the next 18 months to make good progress in integrating the ELOs and implementing LEAP?”

Our plan included . . . Campus LEAP Workshops: teams invited (inclusively) 2 days in January (learn and plan actions) implement Feb-April 2 days in May (share lessons and revise plans) implement June through next May Stipend paid (same amount to all)

Workshop participation: Funding for 30 participants 2011: 57 participants on 17 teams 2012: 102 participants on 23 teams 2013: 118 participants on 21 teams (cross units) 2014: 154 participants on 24 teams (IE) 400+ participants, 85 LEAP teams

Participant feedback: They enjoy action (beyond talk Participant feedback: They enjoy action (beyond talk!) They enjoy collaborations (breaking down silos) A common language spoken across campus Feeling of working together toward common goal

“This is a fad that will go away” (I won’t commit) Upper-level support is critical

“Are you going to tell us what to do with LEAP “Are you going to tell us what to do with LEAP?” No, it’s a grass-roots approach. Campus defines the meaning and best uses of LEAP.

“What support do we get for stepping up “What support do we get for stepping up?” Honor time and effort Stipends (the right amount)

“Who’s going to make everyone else do it. ” No one “Who’s going to make everyone else do it?” No one. We rely on the intrinsic value of LEAP. If it’s valuable, more people will use it.

Making it work: Commitment and Support from the Top Engagement and Ideas from the Campus Everyone’s in (inclusive approach) Aimed at enhancing teaching and learning To improve enrollment, retention, graduation, success

From Discussion to Action: Unifying the Undergraduate Experience 7. One-Year Horizon (university level) 7. One-Year Horizon (university level) 8. Accelerators of Change 8. Accelerators of Change 9. Three Ideas for the Year Ahead 9. Three Ideas for the Year Ahead List 3 things that CU Denver should do or accomplish over the next 12 months so you feel that good progress is being made toward the vision of Integrative Learning. See instructions at each table . . . 10. Most Popular Campus Goals 10. Most Popular Campus Goals 11. Closing Observations and Comments -- Greg, for a consideration of one-year efforts at the level you most need to know about, the individual campus. Greg? From Discussion to Action: Unifying the Undergraduate Experience

From Discussion to Action: Unifying the Undergraduate Experience 10th Annual Undergraduate Experiences Symposium From Discussion to Action: Unifying the Undergraduate Experience [This slide is on screen as participants come in, and possibly during the call to order and welcome from CU Denver leadership.] End with toss to Ken. Ken: Thanks for joining us. As the day goes along we’ll focus pretty narrowly on what steps you want to take in the immediate future, and making this move from [click] discussion to action. But for now we’ll ask you to zoom out to the [click] national context, beginning even further back in fact, to consider the path we’ve been on in higher education for last eight or nine -- Greg Cook, University of Wisconsin Whitewater Ken O’Donnell, California State University