Five Minutes with ACHE

This short article summarizes a meeting of higher education leaders in Washington, D.C. addressing the need for higher education to help adult learners achieve a higher education so that they may be successful in the workforce.  I found that the key points aligned with the ACHE 2010 conference theme “Continuing education - Reflecting upon and responding to the national agenda.” 

What I found interesting were the strategies listed (specific policies for adults, prior learning assessment, etc.) to accommodate adult learners. We in continuing higher education implement these strategies as part of our everyday operations.  Our programs not only address the needs of the community – both credit and non-credit – but they do so expeditiously. 

I encourage you to submit a proposal for the 2010 ACHE Conference to share your institution’s models and programs to ensure the national agenda is met.  The 2010 Program Planning Committee is soliciting proposals that address:   

• Innovations: use of technology, partnerships, pilot programs etc. 
• Best practices in operations: marketing, customer service, scholarships, etc. 
• Best practices in the learning environment: new models, faculty, accelerated programs, non-credit, prior learning etc.
• Learner needs: access, outreach, recruitment, retention, international etc.
• Research findings: current research in the field of adult continuing higher education 
• Enhancing our own work skills: enrichment for the professional   
• Adult Education & the National Agenda: topics related to this category specifically   
• Responding to the national agenda: topics related to this category specifically
• Something new and completely different!            

In February, the 2010 Program Planning Committee will begin work in earnest to ensure a conference filled with interesting and dynamic keynote speakers, sessions filled with relevant information, and an environment that will encourage professional development and camaraderie.  Albuquerque will also prove to be economical for our institutions as the hotel rate and air fares to New Mexico are reasonable. 

2010 Membership Renewals
Just a quick reminder that the ACHE Home Office is in the midst of the annual membership renewals.  You should have received a reminder via email earlier in the month.  Reasons to remain or become a member of ACHE:

• ACHE is a network of working professionals ready and willing to share their knowledge;
• ACHE membership comprises a variety of institutional types and sizes;
• Access to The Journal of Continuing Higher Education; ACHE now has a variety of membership levels: institutional, organizational, professional, student, and retiree;
• You can list your job postings on the ACHE web site;
• ACHE provides opportunities to submit your institution’s programs and colleagues for national recognition;
• ACHE provides opportunities to enhance your resume by presenting at national and regional conferences;  
• ACHE holds regional and national conferences providing a wonderful opportunity to engage internationally with other continuing higher education professionals;
• Membership rates for conferences;
• And finally, the students benefit through our dedication to the field of continuing higher education! 

To quote Ms. Law of the Home Office, “We hope you and your institution will stick around for the great things to come in 2010! “          

Articles on New Mexico and its history
And finally, each month throughout the year, I’ll be writing a short piece about New Mexico to help familiarize you with the depth and breadth of the history and culture of the state. Please have a look at the ACHE 2010 conference site for this month’s quick history of the state of New Mexico. 

Until the next Five Minutes – stay warm, submit a proposal for the Albuquerque conference, and Happy Valentines Day!

Roxanne Gonzales
ACHE President, 2010

We also have out a group of Calls for 2010: for proposals for the 2010 ACHE Annual Conference and Meeting, for 2010 Awards, for nominations for the 2010 elections cycle, for Research Grant applications, and for submissions to the Journal for Continuing Higher Education.

ACHE spring regional meetings are just about to kick off as well, with the first to be held by ACHE Great Lakes in Chicago, Ill. Updates for all the meetings currently scheduled can be found below.

So please take a little more time than usual and check out what's happening around ACHE this month.

• and you're an ACHE Professional Member, click here to renew your membership.
• and you're the institutional representative for an ACHE Institutional Member school, please click on the applicable form to renew: Regular Membership (up to 24 members) or Jumbo Membership (24-40 members).
• and you're the organizational representative for an ACHE Organizational Member (formerly Affiliate Member) entity, please click here to complete a 2010 Organizational Member Renewal Form.

We feel that at times like these, it’s more important than ever to have the support of the larger adult continuing higher education community behind you.   We hope you will stick around for the great things to come in 2010!

President Roxanne Gonzales is very interested to hear about success stories in continuing education, things that your units are doing to change the lives of adult students. In addition, we are always looking for articles on the following topics:

• Experiences in marketing a continuing education program
• A profile of a unique continuing education program at your institution
• Experiences as a professor in adult continuing education
• Article or book reviews

Leadership Special Recognition Meritorious Service Emeritus Marlowe Froke

Distinguished Program: Credit and Non-Credit Creative Use of Technology Older Adult Model Program Outstanding Services to Underserved Population Program

The strategic approach, overall quality, and results achieved are important criteria in determining the winner. A first-place award will be presented to the single entry that exemplifies the most creative and outstanding uses of marketing, either of a multi-faceted campaign or a single initiative. A number of honorable mentions may also be cited.

The Association will present its slate of candidates in the March Five Minutes with ACHE.  In order to submit a nomination, please click here.  Individuals may self-nominate or be nominated by a colleague.  Once nominations are received, the chair of the Nominations Committee, Rick Osborn, will contact nominees with requests for additional information. 

Please direct any inquiries to the Nominations Committee Chair:

Rick Osborn
Immediate Past President, ACHE
Dean, School of Continuing Studies & Academic Outreach
East Tennessee State University
OSBORNR@mail.etsu.edu
(423) 439-8300
(423) 773-3452 (cell)

Participation as a Director-at-Large or as Vice President constitutes a significant opportunity to serve ACHE and continuing higher education. Nominees for Vice President must have served at least two years as a Director-at-Large.  For a description of the roles and responsibilities of ACHE Officers, please consult the ACHE Guide for Officers and Board Members.

We hope that you will consider nominating a colleague this year!

The Journal of Continuing Higher Education considers two types of articles:

• Major articles—current research, theoretical models, conceptual treatments—of up to 7,000 words on:
  • organization and administration of continuing higher education
  • development and application of new continuing education program thrusts
  • adult and nontraditional students
  • continuing education student programs and services
  • research within continuing higher education and related fields
    

Manuscripts should have both theoretical and practical implications.

• “Best Practices” articles of up to 4,000 words. These “Best Practice” articles contain descriptions of new, innovative, and successful programs or practices. The programs or practices should be replicable and of significance to continuing education.

JCHE strives to support continuing higher education by serving as a forum for the reporting and exchange of information based on research, observations, and the experience relevant to the field. Issues are published in the winter, spring, and fall. JCHE is published by Routledge.

Manuscript submission guidelines are available online at or through ACHE’s website.

Potential authors should feel free to consult with JCHE editor James Broomall, University of Delaware. He can be reached at jbroom@udel.edu or (302) 831-2795.

Please share this announcement with colleagues and graduate students who may be interested in submitting manuscripts to JCHE. The Journal has published outstanding graduate student work in the past.

The Research Committee urges ACHE members to assist the Committee in contacting current doctoral students and their submission of a grant application. (Please note: members of the Research Committee, national officers and Board members are not eligible to apply for a grant.)

For further information and questions, please contact Dr. Amber Dailey-Hebert, Acting Research Committee Chair at adailey@park.edu or by phone 816-584-6339.

ACHE Great Lakes February 11 & 12, 2010 Doubletree Hotel Chicago Magnificent Mile ACHE Great Lakes is collaborating with Illinois Council on Continuing Higher Education for their 2010 regional meeting. See the brochure.	ACHE South April 11-14, 2010 Cocoa Beach, Florida Join your ACHE South colleagues and friends at the 2010 South meeting and conference in beautiful Cocoa Beach, FL. Conference registration now open!
ACHE Great Plains February 25-26, 2010 University of Central Missouri Lees Summit, Missouri Conference registration still open!	ACHE West April 29-30th, 2010 BYU Salt Lake City Center Hotel Accommodations: Hyatt Place Hotel Stay tuned for more information!
ACHE MidAtlantic March 28-30th, 2010 Natural Bridge, VA Come see a National Historic Landmark and one of the Modern Wonders of the World while meeting with your MidAtlantic colleagues. Conference registration now open!	ACHE Northeast Metropolitan May 6, 2010 Graduate Center of the City University of New York More information coming soon!

The ACHE West Board invites your nominations for regional officers for the 2010-2011 year. Professional Service develops networks and open doors to new opportunities! Please consider serving your region.

Nominations are open for the following officers:

Chair-elect Treasurer Secretary Board Member at large (3 positions)

ACHE West bylaws require nominees to be institutional, professional, or distinguished (retired) members in good standing of the national association. You may visit the online directory at the ACHE website (www.acheinc.org) for a current listing of members of the west region: log into the ACHE Community with your Username and Password; select Simple Search from the menu on the left; under the drop-down for Use a Saved Search, choose ACHE West - All Members.

Nominations close Wednesday, March 10, 12:00 midnight Mountain time. The election period will commence immediately following and will close on Monday, March 24, 12:00 midnight Mountain time.

Deadline for applications extended to 5:00 p.m. Friday, February 12

Thanks to a COMPASS Regional Development Grant awarded by the ACHE National Office, the Great Plains Region is able to award six (6) grants to cover the cost of registration for the regional conference.

If you are a Great Plains Region member and are experiencing problems getting approval to attend the conference because of budget constraints please contact paula-hogard@utulsa.edu outlining in no more than one page why you may be unable to attend and what you hope to gain by attending the conference.

The ACHE Great Plains Region is currently accepting nominations for two regional officer positions:

• ACHE Great Plains Region Secretary
• ACHE Great Plains Region Chair Elect 

The term of office for each position is two years. The region bylaws state that office progression is recommended for the two yearly positions, with the Chair Elect moving to Chair. The move from Secretary to Chair Elect is optional

Individuals may self-nominate or be nominated by a colleague.  Once nominations are received, Eric Cunningham, (Past Chair: ACHE Great Plains Region) will contact nominees with requests for additional information. 

Participation as Secretary of Chair Elect for the Great Plains Region constitutes a significant opportunity to serve ACHE and continuing higher education. Any individual holding membership in the Association (except affiliate members) and located within the Great Plains Region is eligible for election.

Officers will be elected at the spring annual Great Plains Regional meeting.

Please direct any inquiries to the Nominations Committee Chair:
Eric Cunningham, Immediate past Chair, ACHE Great Plains Region
(573) 875-7649
(800) 231-2391,  ext. 7649
ercunningham@ccis.edu

Postsecondary education is facing repeated funding cuts, and schools are increasingly adopting “one size fits all” approaches that tend not to serve nontraditional students or the community very effectively. In this environment, productive, profitable CE units are being taken down to cut costs and enhance focus on “core business.” The engagement function, however, with its close interrelationship to ongoing CE functions, offers continuing educators a new paradigm and an advantageous institutionally central role. For example, David Grebel and his Extended Education staff at Texas Christian University convened the local faith community around the issue of disaster relief. This led to a coalition of faith groups, emergency preparedness organizations, and university departments in an engaged partnership called “Calming the Storm.”  The effort enhanced TCU Extended Education’s on- and off-campus profile and created additional internal and external alliances.

But what is engagement, anyhow? Engagement crosses all three institutional missions—research, teaching, and service— and ties to the work of faculty, staff, and students. Engagement is a philosophy, strategy, and a methodology. Engaged activity ensures that university expertise addresses and positively impacts societal needs.

In 2005 the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching defined engagement as “a collaboration between higher education institutions and their larger communities for mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge and resources in a context of partnership and reciprocity.”

The involved communities may center upon location, purpose, or need. Whatever the unifying factor defining it, each community has knowledge, experience, and resources that can advance research, increase student learning and experience, and improve knowledge application and dissemination while making all more relevant in the societal context. And happily, through collaborative activity, the postsecondary institution becomes a strategic asset.

Engaged activities can include almost everything postsecondary institutions do. Postsecondary school-community engagement efforts address a community need through intellectual activity while advancing the institutional mission. The engagement may involve discovery and creation of new knowledge through engaged research and application, provision of expert or technical assistance, collaborative development of creative works, advancing student learning and value generation through real world learning experiences, and performance of more effective, efficient application and dissemination of knowledge through community services. It can involve expert service on community boards, committees, or commissions as well as provision of clinical services to special needs or underserved populations.

Engaged activity should be based on real partnerships with agreed roles for all. The gain to be achieved by each should act as the glue holding the collaboration together. The engaged work should be undertaken as a real partnership, respectful of the knowledge, expertise, and resources of each partner. It should recognize the unique, unduplicated experience, expertise, and resources held by the community as well as by the university.

In the best university-community partnerships, interactions become so close and mutually supportive that co-creation results, the products of the engaged activity surpass those that any participating member could have achieved alone, and the gains achieved by each are so substantial that comingling of resources is no longer an issue.

Many governmental funding agencies and private foundations allow access to significant pools of funds only to school-community proposals or give preference to these partnerships. Having a direct community partner can, therefore, open the door to significant new funding. Equally important, an engagement orientation turns every school-community interaction into a potential vehicle for enhanced research, learning, or service. The community becomes the school’s lab bench, classroom, and source of disciplinary best practices and lessons learned. Engaged activity arising from engaged partnerships regularly rises to the level of scholarship applicable well beyond the initial partnership and the local context.

Increasingly, regional accreditation requires postsecondary institutions to document and assess their community collaborations in relation to their missions as well as to the outcomes and impacts achieved. The engagement movement, led in the U.S. by organizations like the Carnegie Foundation and the National Outreach Scholarship Conference and partnership, provides an important opportunity for continuing educators, their programs, and the communities they serve.

In an age of budget cuts, depleted resources and competing personal and professional demands, who has time to reach out to an unknown graduate student? Yet here was a community of people who were not only concerned for the nation’s adult student population, but were directly interested in my own development as a doctoral student and an educational researcher. Attending the conference reaffirmed my belief that continuing educators are instinctively connective and growth oriented. More than most of society, they are especially attuned to the current needs of students, and they have a clear sense of how to guide them to the “next level.”

One of the broader themes of the national agenda is how educators can help build, as well as support, the public concept of a learning organization. Innovation specialist John Seely Brown (2003) defines a learning organization as a structure that can effectively navigate “individuals, as corporate entities or as smaller productive groups” around “the economic, cognitive, and social implications of speed and globalization.” Seely Brown, who refers to himself as “the Chief of Confusion, helping people ask the right questions” makes the point that, “learning is the strategic competence for an entity experiencing change [and] a learning organization entails deliberate culture change.”

The country is experiencing significant changes that require a cultural shift in the concept of learning. Web 2.0 media, the proliferation of mobile computing, the expansion of user-generated content, and open source educational resources suggest that adult learning can no longer be perceived solely as formal online or brick and mortar classroom-based experiences sponsored through educational institutions or workforce training. The definitions of “learning environments” have become more nebulous now that multi-place knowledge networks can happen anywhere. One-time learning opportunities may now have web-enabled communities wrapped around them so participants are part of an instant social network as soon as they pursue any interest or learning objective.

After attending this year’s conference I began to wonder: what does the ACHE community understand about creating supportive learning cultures that can be transmitted back to the public? This is especially important as the nation grapples with how to train adults to become not only effective members of learning organizations, but successful builders of them as well. During the conference, I was delighted to learn about some wonderful examples: Douglas College’s intuitive awareness of how to help employees learn the foundational skills they need to succeed in the workplace; Southern New Hampshire University’s innovative Advantage Program preparing students for university level coursework; and Kutztown Universities’ strategic corporate and university partnerships to serve youthful offenders. Clearly, ACHE members have the foresight and experience to help individual adult learners understand and accept this larger mission. Being able to participate in the ACHE community has fortified my own commitment to that mission and my desire to contribute to it through my doctoral research.

References

Brown, J.S. (2003, August). Introduction: Creating a Learning Culture: Strategy, Practice, and Technology. Retrieved January 2010 from
http://www.johnseelybrown.com/intro_learningculture.html

The Sloan Consortium Blended Learning Conference and Workshop provides the opportunity for administrative leaders, faculty members, instructional designers and researchers to discuss blended learning in higher education.  Attendees will engage with one another throughout this conference by networking, considering effective practices and discussing assessment strategies.  As an attendee, you and your institution will benefit from this highly interactive conference as well as gain the ability to continue discussion and interaction via Sloan-C's asynchronous online Moodle site and online workshops.

Online registration and additional information is available here.

This symposium is designed to bring together individuals interested in the technological aspects of online learning.  The symposium tracks focus on the technologies that drive online learning, highlighting research, applications and best practices of important emerging technological tools. Experts, intermediate users and novices are welcome to participate in symposium activities that will include face-to-face and virtual components.   

Online registration, proposal submission, and additional information is available here.

Join NC State in Raleigh for the 11th annual meeting as we explore how universities "Sustain Authentic Engagement."

Visit the 2010 NOSC Website for more information.

The 2010 National Outreach Scholarship Conference will explore authenticity and sustainability as critical components of engaged scholarship. The important questions of what, where, who, how, and why will be the foci of the Conference reflected in five sections: Program, Place, People, Process, and Philosophy. These focus areas invite a diversity of perspectives and experiences reflecting the academy's authentic and sustained commitment to engaged discovery, learning, application, and integration.

Sponsored by the National Outreach Scholarship Conference partner universities. View a complete list of partner institutuions.

To be added to the mailing list for this conference, please email ContinuingEducation@ncsu.edu