Systemic Resilience: COTA Meta-Strategy, 2020-2025

Goals

To become and remain the transformative community we intend, we will, over five years, implement a series of recommendations to achieve the below goals, which are divided below by pillar. 

Pillar I: Access, Equity, and Inclusion as Functional Catalysts (2020-2023)

  1. Establish a college AEI committee.  
  2. Provide education and resources.  
  3. Conduct AEI Audit.  
  4. Incorporate AEI strategies into core college functions.  

Pillar II: Adaptive and Distinctive Curricula  

  1. Develop COTA Universal Learning Outcomes (ULO).  
  2. Develop frames by which academic units engage in program-level analysis, using curriculum maps to assess where current curriculum introduces, reinforces and emphasizes Universal Learning Outcomes. Systematically review and, as appropriate, restructure the Curricular Approval Process (CAP) to support Universal, Student, and Course Learning Outcomes accomplishment. Design and implement a curricula-focused communications strategy.  

Pillar III: Shared Governance  

  1. Increase awareness of shared governance.  
  2. Increase and focus participation in shared governance.  
  3. Assess, review, and evolve shared governance processes.  

Pillar IV: Student Experience Lifecycle  

  1. Form a college-level working-group of advisors, faculty, students and alumni to review the student experience lifecycle as it currently exists.  
  2. Develop a Student Experience Improvement Plan.  
  3. Implement the Student Experience Improvement Plan.  
  4. Iteratively assess the plan implementation outcomes and develop and adjust as needed.  

Pillar V: Research and Creative Work  

  1. Amplify and support the visibility and impact of COTA faculty research.  
  2. Increase levels of external funding for COTA faculty research. Facilitate the expansion of disciplines, new perspectives, ideas, and methodologies. Increase multi-disciplinary engagement and innovative research.  

Pillar VI: Resource Cultivation and Allocation  

  1. Design and implement a college-wide fiscal communications strategy to educate and update the COTA community as to State, Sponsored Projects, Research, and Foundations funding structures, allocations, and developments. Increase capacities for academic fiscal analysis across COTA faculty and staff leadership through professional development modules. Research best practices in academic budget models. Apply research to COTA practices and to ongoing professional development modules.  
  2. Research peer institution best practices for garnering additional resources to supplement State funding (entrepreneurial, philanthropic, corporate partnership). Apply research to COTA practices and to ongoing professional development modules.  
  3. Strategically position COTA programs with the highest probabilities of garnering additional resources.  
  4. Increase broad COTA participation in the cultivation and allocation of individual donor and corporate funding (development and fundraising).  
  5. Identify and incentivize increased COTA entrepreneurial activity.