Strategic Priority #6
BECOME A THRIVING AND ADAPTIVE LEARNING ORGANIZATION
Saint Mary’s will develop a culture that values innovation by developing and sustaining systems and processes that empower and reward creativity and risk-taking and fostering adaptability and nimbleness to anticipate and respond to opportunities and challenges. We will improve organizational effectiveness by disrupting institutional silos, integrating across academic and non-academic units, fostering effective communication and increased collaboration, and adopting transparent policies, processes and practices. We will employ continuous improvement strategies throughout the institution that promote accountability and high performance. We will invest in technologies that increase efficiency and use data to inform decision making.
Initiatives
We will be updating this page with our accomplishments as we execute the Strategic plan.
2021-2024 Accomplishments
A wide range of both visible and behind the scene work supported this priority.
Faculty Development on Teaching and Learning
The Center for Equity and Excellence in Teaching (CEET) launched in Fall 2023 with its inaugural Faculty Learning Community sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant on teaching and developing Humanities courses. In 2024, CEET will launch Peer Faculty Feedback Program that provides faculty the opportunity to partner with each other to improve and innovate all aspects of teaching through course observations, syllabus and course material review, and student feedback survey consultation. In partnership with EdTech and SDS, universal syllabus template is also developed to ensure student access to academic and essential resources.
Teaching and Technology
The 2023 ATXpo hosted by ITS invigorated campus to engage with new technologies in teaching, including Open Educational Resources and AI. As we continue to embark on seamless integration of technology in course design and teaching, we moved from Moodle to Canvas as the campus’ Learning Management System, which will substantially upgrade student and instructor experiences. Part of this upgrade also includes adoption of Simple Syllabus to standardize the syllabus features and depository capabilities so students can access syllabi to explore courses and readily available campus resources for student learning and wellness.
Data Readiness
Behind the scenes, we adopted PowerBI as our institutional data visualization and reporting tool to improve proactive, data-informed decision making. This improvement was made possible with the move from Unidata to SQL data, and has enabled us to move the Fact Book and KPI dashboards to an interactive format. Along with these improvements, it is noteworthy that we have become a WiFi 6 campus with additional 500 access points across campus.
Updated: July 2024