Timeline

SACS committee meets and begins discussing the survey that needs to be distributed to students, alumni, faculty, staff, and the community. The goals were:

• To get the College informed about and involved in the QEP process.
• To design survey questions eliciting responses that would help us find the areas where we could best improve student learning and success.
• To market the survey to the greatest number of people possible to allow for the most meaningful responses.

Dayla Nolis designed a logo for the QEP survey and posts it prominently on the EFSC webpage. Flyers, emails and face-to-face communication was used to raise awareness about the survey prior to its distribution. Then we launched the survey in paper form and through an online survey website and promoted it by email, on our website and through face-to-face communication. Surveys were distributed to and collected from members of the community, current students, alumni, staff, faculty and administrators.

Committee reviewed all suggestions from the 1000+ collected surveys and narrowed down all responses to 5 topics: Communications, Student Services, Math, Basic Skills, Student Toolkit. These five topics were then to be the subjects of white papers, written over the summer.

White papers were written by faculty members:

• David Bradford: Communications
• Gary Hrezo: Student Toolkit
• Barbara Kennedy: Student Services
• Mark KimQuathamer: Mathematics
• Ramona Smith: Basic Skills

White papers were collected and reviewed by committee members.

Committee reconvenes, views short paper presentations, asks questions, discusses papers and ideas and determines that a re-focus on basic skills and available tools for EFSC students, including topics within the areas of advisement, prep classes and a different focus on tutoring/learning labs, will be the overall QEP.

Steering committee meets and discusses breaking into subcommittees to address pilot studies in advising and prep math with the goal of supporting the overall QEP initiative to refocus our student success center/learning labs/tutoring centers. Marketing for the Welcome Back in Spring Term must be a major emphasis and will require its own subcommittee. Members of the steering committee volunteer to guide the subcommittees, as chairs or participants, and the group brainstormed a list of people with needed expertise to include in these subcommittees. Pilot studies designed to support the overall general topic are planned for Spring Term 2012.

Steering committee reconvenes to oversee the progress of the subcommittee pilot studies. Several studies aimed at advisement, prep math and tutoring are planned for spring 2012 on all campuses.

Several members of the QEP steering committee attended the SACS conference in Orlando, FL December 3-6.

Steering committee will meet to make a more concrete description of the QEP, direct in-depth research about best practices in our chosen QEP area, evaluate the progress of our subcommittees and determine the marketing campaign that will kick off this spring for the defined QEP.