Whether the choice to schedule an engagement is designed by an administrator or a team of department staff or in conjunction with multiple departments, a combination of communication tools are crafted to elicit several feedback cycles where the audience dives deeper into a topic for the purposes of creating an agreement.
Imagine a room of sixty-five people holding various roles at twelve disparate universities or colleges. Using the same URL, they enter individual responses to a ranking question. In this case, the audience is asked to rank their institutions readiness to adopt new practices to usher in digital transformation at their campus.
The group reponses are instantaneoulsy viewed by facilitator and audience. There is no judgement on a right or wrong answer; hence everyone’s anonymous input is honest. The individual gets to see where their experience compares to others – mutual understanding unfolds in less than three minutes.
The facilitator can choose to let the audience have quiet time to reflect, share their thoughts with the person next to them or open the floor for reactions to the way the group was thinking.
Next question, what action/ actions could you take when at your campus that might improve the readiness score by one or two points? Once the group results are viewed, each participant assimilates what won’t work in their demographics, what they had not considered and/ or what they were suspicious of but didn’t know what words to use to express it.
Sounds a lot like what any good facilitator combined with technology for instant feedback is capable of doing, right?
What sets our collaborative services apart is the expertise of our veteran facilitators capacity to blend design process enhanced by technology. You can accelerate a two day summit (using conventional techniques) into an accelerated four-hour session in partnership with our facilitators + what we set up beforehand, called a theme team. The purpose of the theme team is to give a sub-group of people with insights specific to your issues, needs circumstances an opportunity to ‘read between the lines’ and offer additional points of inquiry needed.
Now, here’s the value – what you do after the engagement is now mutually understood, participants have aligned on a course of action and the diverse stakeholders have ownership in the context needed to keep momentum. Your team now has a new capacity to collaborate. You may choose to repeat the process using different tools as more more information is collected – with or without us – but you now experience a methodology to weed out unforeseen consequences from linear decision making.
It is possible to serve more students at lower cost, while also increasing quality and improving the learning experience. Education costs have steadily risen, such that many higher education institutions are now unsustainably overstretched and over committed. Current funding models cannot support the current trajectory. Conferences, workshops and dated training models are insufficient in spreading optimal utilization of tools of the digital era.
Join a community of higher education faculty and administrators committed to starting the “next” twenty-year cycle of next generation practices where faculty and administration are unified.
