Goal 2 – Faculty and Staff Success

Foster innovation, scholarship, and discovery for faculty and staff success.

Objective 1

Foster excellence in teaching to increase High Impact Practices and promote course redesign for contemporary teaching practices by increasing the number of faculty served by the Teaching Resource Center.

Strategies

1. Provide a 10% increase in budget to the Teaching Resource Center to increase the number of faculty members the TRC can support to participate in workshops, institutes, and other instructional training focused on high impact, evidence-based teaching practices, assessment of student learning, such as e-portfolio, the effective use of learning technologies, and redesigning courses, in ways that integrate these high-impact, evidence-based teaching practices as part of semester conversation and in conjunction with the new Institutional Learning Outcomes (ILOs) and General Education Outcomes (GEOs).
2. Provide a 10% increase in budget to support more faculty members to create pilot programs that can then be used to obtain larger external grants on innovative teaching practices and to create collaborative projects across faculty units and disciplines to achieve national teaching standards in integrative learning.

Objective 2

By fall 2017, create a Center of Excellence to promote high impact research, creative activities, and scholarship involving interdisciplinary and international collaborators, and develop a tracking system to do the same.

Strategies

1. Create a Center of Excellence for research, creative activities, and scholarship.
2. Create a universitywide tracking system for research, creative activities, and scholarship.

Objective 3

Increase funding, incentives, reassigned time, and recognition for research, creative activities, and scholarship to enhance the university’s reputation as a center of scholarship.

Strategies

1. Increase funding, incentives, and reassigned time to enhance the support system for research, creative activities and scholarship by 10% progressively over five years.
2. Increase recognition and networking opportunities to enhance the university’s reputation for research, creative activities, and scholarship.

Objective 4

Increase funding and faculty reassigned time to provide more student opportunities for supervised research and creative activities.

Strategies

1. Create an Office for Student Research within the Center of Excellence created in objective 2, supervised by a faculty panel, to mentor and support undergraduate and graduate students, and be paired across divisions for collaboration of research activities.
2. Increase support and recognition for faculty mentoring of student research.

Objective 5

By 2017, develop a plan to increase training opportunities for staff.

Strategy

1. Through a university committee, create and implement a staff development and training plan by 2017.

Objective 6

Increase the diversity of tenure/tenure-track faculty, adjunct faculty, and staff as well as improve the climate of inclusion and support.

Strategies

1. Increase funding by 10% progressively over five years to support recruitment strategies to strengthen diversity.
2. Improve the climate to support retention among faculty and staff.

Objective 7

Increase Tenure Track Density (TTD) based on projected student demand and FTES growth, and decrease Student to Faculty Ratio (SFR).

Strategies

1. Increase TTD to at least 63.6% by the end of the five-year period.
2. Reduce the SFR to 23.8 by the end of the five years.
3. Create a positive/healthy work-life culture/balance to attract and retain faculty.