Welcome to the LA AMP! This is a public space for discussion of the Academic Master Planning process for the Liberal Arts.
Start here with the LA AMP planning framework.
View the planning nodes below and leave comments.
Node: Aspirations
Aspirations: the ends-in-view of the student’s engagement in education
Odysseus Inc.
Node: Support
Support: leveraging student assets and addressing needs
EARS
- Develop and improve EARS, in which EARS can work with academic advisors, counselors, etc.
- Work with Tony Wright from Academic Advising and Richard Palmer of TLED to develop and integrate Blackboard and Colleague System — institute different levels to access information
- EARS improvements
- Create a related Financial Aid page for the EARS website for students.
- Student Affairs page (look up to see if it’s on EARS)
- Separate page for faculty page — EARS shell on blackboard
- EARS flyer via snail mail
- Connect via Student Affairs monthly meetings (Tony Wright)
- Connect via Student Guidance forum
- TLED connection
- Reach out to SI/Embedded Tutors in ECHS and Dual Credit courses
Communication
- Work on developing and initiating a more communicative way in which the myriad of services ACC function and operate. Some possible ways that faculty members, staff, and student services (SAS, Counslors, Advisors, TLED) can communicate more efficiently could be:Create Services Portal via ACC App
- Community Circles — Twitter version that lets employees interact with one another
- Intranet ACC Portal for faculty and staff.
- WOLFF version for ACC — Instant notifications throughout all platforms.
- Implement a grace period notification system for students, faculty, and student services. When a student withdraws from a course, they have 3-5 days in order to make it an official withdrawal. The notification system will alert the faculty members, academic advisors, and faculty mentors, who can then discuss possible options with the student.
Faculty MEntor (Students)
- A robust mentor program integrating mentoring, Gateways, GQ, EARS, and departmental and classroom faculty support
Node: Study
Study: the “content” of the student’s path toward mastery
Liberal Arts Gateway
Node: Situation
Situation: The student’s roots, the context that forms the student’s support network
Religious Literacy Initiative
Cross-Unit Proposals
Cross-unit proposals are proposals that serve multiple nodes. An example: A Digital Fluency Maker Space might serve curriculum development in the LA Gateway and the Religious Literacy Initiative
Digital Fluency Project
A joint proposal from ADMC, CIS, and LA. More to come!
We in the Student Affairs team at RGC were interested in putting forth an idea for a initiative to offer 8-week courses during the more early-morning timeframe when there is available classroom space. This is in part a response to the proposed initiative to greatly increase the 8-week offerings at ACC designed to accelerate the timeline for graduation and transfer.
Many students who work in the downtown area that RGC serves would be in a position to take early morning classes in the 7am to 9am time bracket. Often this same population of students take evening courses, but struggle to find enough courses each semester to make progress toward their goal.
The population this initiative would serve includes students who must work while going to college, due to financial pressures. We often find, in advising these students, that they would take an additional class or two if more were available at a time when they are not at work.
The equity focus of this initiative derives from the fact that an overwhelming majority of the population ACC serves works during “regular business hours” and must do so in order to support themselves and their families. They often find the traditional times classes are offered at colleges a barrier to completing a degree or certificate.
A specific plan would be to offer the kinds of courses at RGC in the 7am to 9am time frame, during the 1st and 2nd 8-week teaching terms, that are ideal for any AA or Liberal Arts transfer plan, such as GOVT, HIST, ENGL, SOCI, PSYC, ECON, and ARTS courses. This would allow students who are undecided about a major, but know that they plan on transfer for a Liberal Arts, Social Sciences, or Communications major at a Texas four-year college, to make serious progress toward this goal while maintaining a work schedule, a must for many students in the Austin area.
I recommend a Liberal Arts Task Force to evaluate the state of Academic Freedom in all of the disciplines. This would be innovative in the sense that it has never been done before. It is much needed because SACS-COC and the ACC Board of Trustees mandate academic freedom. It is also the sine qua non, or necessary condition for higher education. One way to actualize this recommendation would be to ask the AAUP to send an evaluating team to ACC to investigate and report upon the status of Academic Freedom, defined by the AAUP as “the freedom to teach.”
In the service of equity and inclusion, I suggest that the rigor of the dual credit classes be scientifically assessed using a methodology that will be field-tested and validated. If my hypothesis is correct; namely that the dual credit classes are fraught with the high likelihood of being “dumbed down,” i.e. taught with dehanced rigor, then equity is not achieved, not to mention institutional integrity. Of course, once rigor as an abstract concept is operationally defined, an instrument developed and validated, there is nothing to prevent that scientific methodology being applied to assess the rigor in all of the classes in the Liberal Arts, i.e. Dual Credit (in the high schools), ECHS, and traditional classes.