Strategic plan maps out VCU’s future

Just as sports teams have game plans and musicians have set lists, VCU has its own playbook: the VCU Strategic Plan. This plan helps outline areas in which the university can improve and presents paths that can lead to needed improvements.

“Embracing a World-Class Student Experience” is the theme a committee uses to draft VCU’s next strategic plan that centers on how students perceive the university.

To committee members, the theme emphasizes the magnitude of changes that can be made.

“This plan is aimed at making VCU a better, higher quality university over the next 15 years,” said Joseph Marolla, director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and co-chair of the committee. “Again, that doesn’t mean that we don’t think we’re a high-quality university right now. But it’s trying to project ‘OK, where are we going over the next 15 years?’ and ideally what would be some of those directions that we should go in.”

Several features of the student experience seem to have a larger focus of the committee’s planning than others. Interrelated topics that may see changes in the next several years include student engagement, class size, enrollment services and diversity in general education.

Some ideas have already reached higher levels of sophistication than others. For example, Reuban Rodriguez, associate vice president and dean of student affairs, noticed that the early drafts of the strategic plan indicated that students often become frustrated with the clerical aspects of being a VCU student.

“I was working with one of the subcommittees that was looking at student issues related to facilities and other types of services . . . and one of the foremost ideas that came up was to try to create what would be called a ‘one-stop shop,'” Rodriguez said.

He explained that students wanted to be able to go to one physical location and be able to take care of all of their functions including enrollment services, financial aid, accounting or records and registration.

Henry Rhone, co-chair of the student strategic plan, said simplifying enrollment services ranks as a necessary step.

“We’d like (enrollment services) to be a nonissue in terms of it consuming a lot of your time and frustration,” he said.

Marolla reinforces the impact such a facility could have.

“Everything could happen in one central place so you wouldn’t be walking all over the place . . . so that people would actually talk to one another about all of these issues so you wouldn’t get contradictory information.”

He suggested other improvements could be made in the general education curriculum, where an emphasis on diversity could shorten a student’s leap into an unfamiliar profession.

Rodriguez said the idea is to give students a glimpse of life after college.

“Obviously, in most career fields you’re going to have a diversity of people engaged in those efforts whether it’s medicine or the military or other types of careers,” he said. Adding that this essentially might help students realize what the outside world is like, particularly as related to their major.

Rhone, the vice provost for student affairs and enrollment services, said he thinks future general-education classes will be able to better prepare students for the outside world.

“I took classes with the belief that exposure to math, English, history (and) science was a building block as well as helping a student decide what you want to pursue in a more aggressive way,” he said. “There are courses that all students could benefit from in terms of being a well-rounded person.”

Two pieces of the student experience to consider are class size and the level of student engagement, which often go hand in hand.

Marolla and Rhone agreed that the university may have to hire more faculty members to address both issues.

Rhone said he thinks students in a small class have more chances to interact with the faculty members

Committee members said having small classes while offering enough sections to accommodate students will be a goal that’s hard to achieve.

“The resources are clear,” Rhone said. “You need more faculty to be able to do that and you need more space.”

Eliminating large classes altogether seems to be the ideal option, but Marolla views this as one aspect of the plan that would be nearly impossible to accomplish.

“Are there going to be some large classes?” he asked. “Well, there are. I think one of the tasks that we have as a university is – given economically that large classes are not something that we can just do away with – how can we create a small-class experience while students are in fact enrolled in a fairly large class?

“That’s the challenge,” he said. “How do you break it down? How do you take those 300 people in such a large setting and make it feel a bit smaller than that at least some of the time?”

Michael Walsh, political science major, said that he has come to prefer smaller classes in his three years at VCU.

“It allows for the possibility of a seminar setup, which means regardless of testing difficulty and actual grade, that chance is going to allow the opportunity for more discussion and more ideas bouncing off of each other,” Walsh said.

Other suggestions that committee members offered included focusing more on helping students analyze material rather than regurgitating it and the incorporating technology as a break from only direct lectures.

Rodriguez cited an example with the Blackboard technology.

“Let’s say if a student is unwilling to speak within a class structure, yet the Blackboard system is a part of that particular class system where the student feels more comfortable online in responding to questions or posting ideas up on Blackboard.

“So again, (we are) going back to the diversity of our student body, knowing that we have many different types of people and looking at various ways within that classroom to get them engaged.”

Supplementing learning via technology arose periodically in the early drafts of the strategic plan, but Marolla and other committee members said they do not think online correspondence can completely supplant personal contact.

“As powerful as computers and the Internet are, there’s this option for us that we could e-mail each other,” he said. “What students are saying is ‘I don’t mind e-mailing occasionally, but I want to talk with a person. I don’t want a virtual relationship with my instructor. I want a personal one.'”

Committee members never suggested that developing a new strategic plan means going through the motions of simply writing the general university goals. Instead, they say, it is a chance for VCU to take a look in the mirror and seize the opportunity to determine its own future.

“I think we are not wanting to just fix things but really propel ourselves into the future,” Rhone said. “We want to be proactive rather than reactive.”

Rodriguez expressed optimism about VCU’s growth with a firm Strategic Plan as its foundation.

“We really want to continue moving to being a learning centered institution and what that means… is that learning can occur basically anywhere on campus or even outside of campus that we want to encourage interactions between other students and between students and faculty members,” he said. “The learning process doesn’t just end within a 50-minute time period within a particular classroom.”

Therefore, the committee urges VCU students to their concerns about what life at VCU beyond bubble-sheet evaluations. To steer the strategic plan in the right direction, students can play an active role in developing the plan by providing feedback.

“We want to say, ‘Here’s where we want to go. Let’s figure out a way to get there,'” Marolla said. “I think that’s hard for students because you’re not here for that long, you know. I mean students, they’re not thinking about what VCU’s going to be like 10 years from now. They’re worried about what VCU’s going to be like next week.”

A final draft of the plan should be completed during this calendar year, and Rodriguez invites students to monitor the progress through various drafts and documents, and then offer feedback, at vcu.edu/vcu2020.