And that's a wrap!

End of Spring quarter, end of our academic year. Wow. What a wild ride. We are certainly living in a time of great change and if you don't buckle in, you may be jostled a bit as new people, processes, tools, technologies, ideas...fly in and out, up and down, all around.

UW Tacoma will soon release a new strategic plan. The result of very hard work by many people over a year of consensus-building, it affirms our ACCESS mission as the center of a focus on diversity, innovation, community, and  excellence. This may seem apparent, but it took hard work to own, agree, convince ourselves that we are not a baby UW Seattle. We are Tacoma. With a vision:

The University of Washington Tacoma fosters thriving and equitable society by educating diverse learners and expanding knowledge through partnership and collaboration with all our communities.

 

Now why am I sharing this on the TLT all-things-learning & technology site? Because this campus vision affects each and all of us as we move forward with who we are and what we value. So, here in the Faculty Resource Center, Darcy and I wrap the year with excitement and commitment to provide what our diverse, busy, new traditional learners need - including the support of a faculty able to deliver flexible and innovative pedagogy.

iTech Fellows has 19 participants this summer, ready to take 20th Century teaching skills and adapt them to online and hybrid environments. Yeah! Why? UW Tacoma responding to the need for new literacies, reduced seat time, and more flexible paths to graduation from students. We're exploring change in teaching, engaging, and designing for anytime/all the time learning.

We've also seen the roll out of analytics on campus, provided by our collaboration with Civitas Learning: a first time ability to SEE real time student data from a lens of persistence. Taking a first look at what we know now: F2F degree program undergraduates who avail themselves of online courses are 7% more likely to persist to the next quarter than their peers taking only on-ground courses at UW Tacoma. SEVEN percent. 

And that's even though UW Tacoma has only put 3% of its catalog online. Even though 95% of the online courses each quarter are full within a day or two, sometimes within hours. Even though more than 10% of our students are rushing to find and take these time-flexible courses any given quarter. 

Our new strategic plan's focus on access is bound to change these numbers. If we truly focus on student success, we'll create more online and hybrid options. Create options for students to go to school, to work AND to take care of their families. Create more graduates. Here's the kind of data we now know, thanks to Civitas: 

• 10.24% of our students who took a mix of online and F2F courses do not  persist to graduation.
• 17.25%   of our students who do NOT avail themselves of online courses did not persist.

We can do better for them. Buckle your seat belts! UW Tacoma is learning to fly.