As a Dean of Academic Affairs, your priority lies in the creation of an environment where academic excellence flourishes. You champion high standards, seek to support faculty, and empower learners to reach their full potential.
Data driven insights are essential to enhancing the quality of education across campus, but balancing the needs of both faculty and students, while ensuring a cohesive and effective academic experience, can be challenging.
Layer on top of this some significant changes you’ve had to navigate! Content is increasingly offered online, curricula need to stay engaging for shortening attention spans, and students have increasing needs.
So, in an ever changing higher education landscape, how do you balance the need to evolve your approach, while considering the needs of everyone across campus, to continue driving academic excellence?
Maintaining academic excellence
At Glean, we recognize that commitment to rigorous academic standards is at the core of your mission.
Achieving true academic excellence requires more than just setting high expectations; it demands a deep understanding of student learning patterns and the effectiveness of your academic programs.
And yet, limited funding can hinder your ability to continuously invest in such programs while ensuring compliance with accreditation and evaluating standards can be time consuming.
By analyzing student interactions with learning materials and assessments, you can quickly identify how students engage with course material as well as where they struggle. This allows swift pinpointing of areas where adjustments can be made to enhance the learning experience and elevate academic performance.
Maximizing positive student outcomes
Inherently interwoven with the need to maintain academic standards is student success.
Academic Affairs are deeply invested in the success of every student, wanting to see them not just graduate, but thrive both academically and personally.
To achieve this, departments need to understand the unique challenges students face and provide them with the support they need to overcome obstacles and reach their full potential.
Not only does fostering student engagement in academic programs and extracurricular activities drive the overall student experience, but a lack of quality provision can lead to student attrition, negatively impacting the institution’s reputation and financial stability.
But student demographics are shifting. Whether in relation to new majority learners where, according to the Center for Higher Education Policy and Practice, 64% of students work whilst going to school, 37% are over 25 and 34% are the first person in their family to attend college, or the rise in students registering as neurodiverse, close to 15-20% of the population.
This transition is resulting in a need for Deans of Academic Affairs to evolve their means of maximizing positive student outcomes.
By understanding individual learning patterns and engagement levels, you can collaborate with VPs of Student Success to intervene early and offer targeted assistance across a diverse student population. These actions ultimately improve student grades, raise course completion rates, and enhance overall academic performance.
Supporting your faculty
Whilst the student cohort may be the largest body on campus, it is equally important for academic affairs to support the needs of faculty.
To foster a culture of academic excellence, you need to empower your educators with the tools and resources they need to be both effective and innovative.
This includes streamlining administrative tasks, facilitating collaboration, and promoting cutting-edge teaching practices. A process that is becoming increasingly more essential as increased demands are placed on faculty to balance teaching, research and accessibility responsibilities.
In some cases, a lack of sustainable workload is further exacerbating issues around recruiting and retaining qualified faculty members, leaving institutions to struggle to meet the demand for academic programs.
As such, finding ways to provide educators with a simple way to centrally manage course materials, communicate with students, and track progress, becomes increasingly significant as a way in which institutions can free up valuable time for faculty to focus on what they do best.
How Glean helps promote academic excellence
By providing Deans of Academic Affairs to meet the need of both students and educators, Glean can play a pivotal role in driving academic excellence.
Here are 5 key ways in which Glean can support your efforts and help you achieve your goals:
- Driving student outcomes: 84% of students using Glean reported that the technology helped them achieve better grades whilst 85% said that they felt more confident and 81% less stressed.
- Early intervention for at-risk students: Glean offers a proactive solution to giving students the support they may need academically, improving retention and success rates.
- Reduced workload for more 1:1s: Glean offers onboarding and training materials to all students given access. This reduces your workload by empowering them with helpful tools proven to improve grades, which means you have more time to spend on individual, high-risk cases.
- Data-driven insights into student learning: Glean provides detailed analytics on engagement trends across the student population, performance, and learning behaviours, allowing you to identify areas for improvement and collaborate with faculty on data-informed decisions.
- Personalized learning experiences: Glean helps you tailor learning experiences to individual student needs, promoting deeper engagement, increased accessibility and better outcomes.
Striking the right balance to ensure academic excellence is achieved is an ongoing challenge.
Glean is committed to helping you create a learning environment where every student and faculty member has the opportunity to succeed.
Proven to increase academic performance, confidence, and independence, Glean empowers the majority of students with the tools they need and reduces your workload to the individual cases who need you most. Data-driven insights ensure you can collaborate with faculty to make continuous improvement, ensuring that your institution maintains the highest academic standards.
Click the button below to learn more about how you could offer Glean across your campus.
