Articles: Operational Efficiencies

1/2/2013

At The Ohio State University, the term “master plan” is obsolete. That’s because what traditional master plans often lack—input from an institution’s academic and finance folks—are an integral part of the One Ohio State Framework Plan, shares Amanda Hoffsis, senior director of physical planning.

1/2/2013

As distance learning programs are developed and then refined, there are many options for national, regional, and statewide distance education consortia that the institutions can, and often do, join. The consortia help in sharing resources and tips to help each other with distance learning efforts.

1/2/2013

In all the understandable buzz about massive open online courses (MOOCs) and alternative models for delivering content, remember this: Residential campuses will continue to be critical to higher education and to preparing a competitive 21st-century workforce. Why? For starters, as MIT President L. Rafael Reif wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal, high quality online education and affordable residential campuses are intertwined.

11/26/2012

As the December issue was going to press mere days after Hurricane Sandy ripped through the Northeast, we were already hearing of colleges and universities in the region beginning to put the pieces back together. While the monstrous storm caused power outages and damage to many institutions, the effects likely would have been far worse, and even deadly, if not for effective disaster preparedness planning.

11/20/2012

UBTech 2012 and 2013 presenter Daniel Rasmus is a strategist who helps clients put their future in context. Rasmus uses scenarios to analyze trends in society, technology, economics, the environment, and politics to discover implications used to develop and refine products, services and experiences. Previously, Rasmus was the director of business insights at Microsoft, where he helped the company envision how people will work in the future.

11/19/2012

Hurricane Sandy made landfall in Atlantic City, NJ, at the end of October, creating devastation up and down the East Coast. Over 100 people in the U.S. died as a result of the storm and millions were without power for weeks. College and university campuses were not immune to the damage.

11/16/2012

It’s nice to see something grow and take on a life of its own. When we first developed the Models of Efficiency program, we honestly didn’t know quite what to expect. We knew that, in the depths of one of the worst economic crises the country has faced in many years, people were desperately trying to find ways to “do more with less.” That mantra was drilled into the way we all did our jobs each day.

11/8/2012
UWG's pub and print department was mandated to become self-funded by 2013. The department searched and found equipment that could meet its needs affordably in other departments and shifted them to pub and print. Worker responsibilities were realigned and some student work was offloaded to the students themselves. The efforts generated both productivity improvements and financial savings.
11/7/2012
SCU's Clinical Internship program was manually maintained and took hours each day for staff to review credit request forms and patient procedure logs. A new Clinical Internship Portal automated students' schedule. Students and clinical faculty now submit and approve credit and patient tracking forms online, substantially reducing time involved and eliminating paper.
11/7/2012
Four different programs were being used for end-of-course evaluations, and the disparate system was inconsistent and slow. The college purchased an online system with automatic emails delivering a personalized URL specifically for the class taken. The pilot achieved a savings of more than $17,000.
11/2/2012

From sources of funding to student engagement models, from the use of mobile technology to social media, multiple disruptive forces create surprises for administrators, frustrations for academics and bewilderment for students. Uncertainty threatens to incapacitate institutions as they choose for change to be thrust upon them, or attempt to avoid or ignore the strategic importance of the changes taking place around them.

10/25/2012

While enterprisewide IT projects are generally funded through a central operating budget and approval process, smaller projects may depend on the resourcefulness of the department head or even a professor to get done.

9/26/2012

Just because your institution maintains a Facebook page and a Twitter account does not mean that you’re utilizing social media channels to the maximum benefit of your college or university.

9/25/2012

Earlier this year in March, college and university presidents convened in Washington for an annual meeting to discuss the state of education. I was a panelist for a session entitled “Staying Ahead of the Curve: Rethinking the Higher Education Model.” While I don’t believe that the days of the traditional educational model are over, that model is on life support for most of us.

9/21/2012

Universities face a conundrum: Funding for higher education is on the decline, but enrollment is at an all time high—how can they do more with less? One answer may be Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing (TDABC). It’s a system to discern and analyze costs and compare this to what is driving demand.

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