Course Scheduling Taskforce
I am pleased to report that the Course Scheduling Taskforce has met four times this semester and we are making great strides towards improving our course schedules for our students and eliminating overlapping classes for faculty. The goals for the Taskforce are to devise a course scheduling system that:
- Is student centered
- Is a better use of available space
- Has a grid with common start and stop times
- Attempts to build in common times in the week when there are no classes scheduled to facilitate campus speakers and faculty and staff development activities
With members of all three Schools well represented, we have been able to identify various scheduling problems that occur across the College and as we build the new scheduling grid, we are considering the very unique needs of each School. The new grid will take into account specific classroom use as well as start and stop times across a potential Monday through Saturday schedule. Building a new six-day grid does not mean it will necessarily be populated across all days right away, but as our student population grows and changes we need to consider class schedules that expand across the entire week, including M-W-F, Th-Sat or all-day Saturday alternatives.
The Course Scheduling Task Force is:
Vickie Shields, Adelfa Sullivan, Gregory Robinson, Sandip Thanki, Susan Growe,
Gwen Sharp, Jaime Castle, Kevin Graziano, Kim Smith, Bryan Sigel, Marco Lopez
The Chancellor’s visit to discuss budget projections for the 2020-22 biennium
On Friday, November 17th, NSHE Chancellor Thom Reilly, and four other members of the system office came to hear a presentation by President Patterson and the NSC leadership team on our budget proposals for the next biennium and particularly budget priorities in anticipation of the 2019 Legislative session. The meeting was very positive and we received valuable feedback from the members of the system office on the feasibility of our requests and even alternative avenues for garnering matching funds for large projects. The funding priorities presented included (unranked):
- State matching funds for construction of the new School of Education Building
- State matching funds for construction of the new Health Sciences building with CSN
- Early Childhood education programs
- Support for Speech Pathology Masters program unfunded in last biennium
- New degree program in Informatics/Data Science
- Enhancement funds for the Statewide mission
- Dual and co-enrollment programs with High Schools
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In my last newsletter update, we were roughly ankle deep in the budget cycle. Now, we’re about hip high, and we’ll be working hard over the next few weeks to ensure that we don’t go under water. From what I have seen so far, the strategic initiative requests are well-reasoned and promise to benefit the college. We won’t be able to support all of them, but I am encouraged about what we can do to move NSC forward as our most severe budget shortages hopefully recede ever further into the background.
Granted, as much as it may pain Kevin Butler to hear me say, it’s not all about budget and finances. Progress continues in a number of areas ranging from policy, to our burgeoning first-year experience effort, to the consolidation of student support services in the newly acquired “High Tech Circle” building (down the road from the main campus). A major event for next week is the Board of Regents meeting, and Provost Shields and I will be presenting a few items to the Academic Affairs Council, including the proposal to add a Master’s in Speech Language Pathology to our academic offerings. We also will introduce a long overdue deletion of a Bachelor of Applied Science in Criminal Justice that has no enrollment and was largely displaced by our growing Bachelor of Arts Degree.
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LNAP!
Congratulations to Kathryn Tucker and her team for planning and hosting Friday night's Long Night Against Procrastination. It was the 6th time they've held this event and it is still going strong - 113 students completed their check-in survey.
Course Assistant Update
As you probably know, Course Assistants (CAs) are students who work as embedded specialists and peer mentors. One of their main roles is to lead supported study sessions and writer’s workshops. As of 11/13, these sessions and workshops have been attended 568 times by 174 unique students. That's an average of 11.6 unique students per class who have attended at least one study session/writing workshop. CAs also met with 53 unique students for 73 total 1-on-1 tutoring appointments, and 119 unique students for 135 1-on-1 peer mentoring appointments. Course assistants sent 535 unique outreach messages to 182 individual students and received 302 messages from 133 individual students.
Are you a fan of documentaries?
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Blazing the Trail
Congratulations to Jackie Semana and Marquis Lee, supported by Kat Mulvey from ITS, for presenting at the Pacific Association of Collegiate Registrars & Admissions Officers Conference last week in Spokane, Washington. Their presentation was titled “Blazing the Trail with OnBase Workflow”.
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NSF STEM in HSI Program
I attended a conference sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) on Transforming STEM Education in Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI). The conference brought representatives from two-/four-year colleges and research-intensive universities from across the Southwest (CA, NV, AZ, NM, and TX) to discuss issues facing HSIs. Topics included building stronger pathways between two- and four-year institutions, recruitment/retention, and infusing culturally-responsive curriculum and practices into STEM. This conference is one of the components developed in conjunction with the release of a brand-new NSF program that will focus on building capacity at HSIs (
Read more here). NSF plans to release its first funding solicitation for this program sometime between December and January (with an expected 90-day turnaround). Depending on the details of the program solicitation, NSC hopes to work with faculty in Physical and Life Sciences to develop a proposal.
Child Care Information Session
We have renegotiated our contract with our City of Henderson partners to offer full-day care (9am – 6pm Monday-Friday) for children between the ages of 3 and 5 and evening care (~5:00 – 8:30 pm) for children between the ages of 5 and 12. For spring 2018, there will be no out-of-pocket cost to students, but spaces are limited with a December 15 deadline! Applications can be submitted to
Christina.Squires@nsc.edu (or dropped off in LAS 156). Please share this information with your students -
www.nsc.edu/childcare.
Spring Convocation Date & Planning Meeting
Spring Convocation—a day of professional development for faculty and staff—is scheduled for Friday, February 16th. Faculty and staff are invited to attend our first planning committee meeting on Tuesday, 11/21 from 1:00 -2:30 in RSC 303. We will review feedback from Fall Convocation and discuss the day’s structure and possible workshops.
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Outcomes Assessment
Our Academic Advising Center, Academic Success Center, Disabilities Resource Center, and NSSA have been working diligently on our outcomes assessment, with an emphasis on both programmatic and student learning outcomes. Our programmatic outcomes are focusing on increased utilization, improved satisfaction, cross-utilization of academic support services, and active collaboration with academic faculty (as evidenced by more communication and referrals from faculty).
We are especially excited about the assessment of our student learning outcomes in each department. In student affairs literature, student learning has been traditionally assessed through the sole use of self-report measures. While our team recognizes the importance of student perception of learning, we do not feel as though student self-report is an adequate measure of student learning. As such, we are combining student self-report measures with direct measures/assessment of student learning. Perhaps most importantly, we are very interested in assessing the congruence (or incongruence) between student perception of learning and their actual abilities (as assessed through direct measurement/assessment). This process has been challenging, but our team of Directors has been very innovative in developing strategies to directly assess our student learning outcomes.
I would like to commend the following Directors for all of their hard work, innovation, and creativity in this process: Alex Kunkle (advising), Cristina Caputo (tutoring), Sandi Patton (DRC), and Phil LaMotte (NSSA). They could have very easily utilized only self-report measures to assess their outcomes, since this is the accepted standard in student affairs literature. However, they wanted to ensure that we are collecting valid and useful data as it relates to student learning, which will better inform our work in our student affairs programming here at NSC. In addition, through this combined model of indirect and direct methods of assessment, we are striving to have NSC set the standard for high quality outcomes assessment. Please let us know if you have any questions or would like to participate in this process.
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High-Impact Practices (HIPs) include Learning Communities, Writing-Intensive Courses, Collaborative Assignments and Projects, Undergraduate Research, and Capstone Courses. In the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), these activities are measured by the following six areas.
- Participating in an internship, co-operation, field experience, student teaching, or clinical placement;
- Participating in a learning community or some other formal program where groups of students take two or more classes together;
- Taking courses involving a community-based project (service-learning);
- Working with a faculty member on a research project;
- Participating in a study abroad program; and
- Completing a culminating senior experiences (e.g. capstone course, senior project or thesis, comprehensive exam, portfolio).
Do the High-Impact Practices at NSC correlate with better outcomes? In 2015, 324 seniors took NSC’s NSSE survey. About 70% of the students in the study reported that they have participated in at least one High-Impact Practice. Among the six HIPs measured in NSSE, our seniors participated in:
- Service-learning (53.4%),
- Internship, co-operation, field experience, student teaching, or clinical placement (30.6%)
- Culminating senior experiences (23.4%), and
- Learning community (17.6%)
Overall, seniors who participated in HIPs reported significantly more perceived gains than their peers who had not participated in any HIPs (Mean = 39.59, vs. Mean = 33.36 out of 60 points). Students who participated in HIPs were retained at a higher rate (90%) than those of their non-participation peers (76%), particularly for racial and ethnic minority, first-generation, and low-income students.
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From all of us in the Office of the Provost: Have a terrific holiday break!
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NSC Office of the Provost | 702-992-2663 | http://nsc.edu/provost
Be Bold | Be Great | Be State
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