Agenda and Meeting Notes

Deans Council Agenda – Oct. 15, 2024

• KU Brand Alignment – Karla Leeper
• Student Success Model – Misty Chander and Ric Steele
• Changes to KU Credit Hour Policy – Nick Stevens and Casey Wallace

Meeting Notes

KU Brand Alignment

Karla Leeper, Vice Chancellor for Strategic Communications and Public Affairs, shared updates on a new branding platform for the university. The Marketing Communications team will be working to build a brand-focused culture through regular meetings with academic communicators with the goal of ensuring brand consistency across all units. A new web template for KU is expected to roll out in roughly a year. In the meantime, deans are encouraged to work with their school’s communicator to review department webpages and take down pages that aren’t needed, remove obsolete content, assess brand compliance, assess resources and as much as possible, and time new content and collateral to coincide with the brand rollout.

Student Success Model

Misty Chandler, Assistant Vice Provost for Academic Success, and Ric Steele, Associate Vice Provost for Graduate Studies, presented the Student Success Model to deans. It includes measurable goals that map to the loss-momentum framework to prevent students from falling through the cracks. While the Student Success Model addresses many elements of the student’s journey, persistence and completion rates are key outcomes. Deans were provided a draft version of the Student Success Model with the newly added institutional goals and asked to discuss it with their teams/units and share feedback with Chandler and Steele within the next month. Steele shared with deans the Crimson and Blue Student Service Models, which recognize the differing nature of graduate programs – research intensive or coursework only. The presentation outlined an updated process to determine which service model (Crimson or Blue) is most appropriate for each program.  The process includes discussion with each dean’s office and program director, Jayhawk Global, Graduate Studies and Academic Success.  Deans were provided the detailed process slides and asked to share initial feedback by Nov 1. The process will be tested this fall with ongoing feedback from academic units. 

Changes to KU Credit Hour Policy

With continued growth of in-person enrollment, in the next few years the Lawrence campus will experience greater space constraints, creating the need to become more streamlined and efficient with course scheduling and space utilization. Nick Stevens, Vice Provost of Enrollment Management, and Casey Wallace, University Registrar, are working to formalize historical practice/procedure regarding classroom space utilization into policy in a transparent manner. Related to course scheduling, KU needs to improve consistency in credit hour application to facilitate consistent course days that will support efficient and maximum use of space. The credit hour policy, effective Fall 2025, will provide transition plans for programs that need it. 

Deans will receive the draft policy and are encouraged to discuss it thoroughly with their units. Stevens and Wallace are working with deans to put structure around course components, course minimum and maximum enrollments, instruction modes and variable credit hours, such as for an internship, while still meeting regulatory requirements. A future Deans Council meeting will address formalizing a class scheduling policy.