TRANSFORMED
Hosted by Higher Digital, TRANSFORMED is a podcast that sheds new light on the resurgence of higher education. In each episode, Higher Digital President and Chief Technology Officer, Joe Gottlieb, interviews guests to explore the new Whys, the new Whats, and the new Hows of higher ed. Strategy and tactics; planning and execution; people, process, and technology – it’s all on the menu, because that’s what’s required to truly transform.
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TRANSFORMED
Pivoting Off the Strategic Plan to Adopt a 7-week Course Structure
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Western Technical College president Roger Stanford shares with host Joe Gottlieb how moving to a seven-week term structure transformed student completion rates and revitalized curriculum through comprehensive instructional design.
• Complete curriculum redesign of over 1,000 courses
• Creation of an empowered steering committee to manage implementation
• Three-year timeline allowing faculty breathing room during pandemic
• Centralized change management reporting directly to the president
• Dedication to maintaining "unconditional positive regard" throughout the process
• Immediate improvements in second-term retention rates
• Faculty discovering reduced cognitive load benefits of teaching fewer courses simultaneously
• Commitment to embedding universal design and culturally relevant curriculum
• Program reviews resulting in more streamlined, focused degree pathways
• Balancing academic freedom with instructional design expertise
"While we expected some faculty resistance or departures, the majority embraced the change and are now prouder than ever of their curriculum and assessment alignment." Listen in for the full story,
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The other approach that I would say is really central is we created very early on, as soon as we had the change manager and time manager. We had to set a steering committee and you know people do those things all the time but we wanted an empowered steering committee. We didn't want the senior team every week having to manage all of the different pieces that are a part of this, because the truth is, we needed to worry about the policy shifts and changes. We didn't need to worry about nuts and bolts and we put several of the senior leaders were on it. But when we created the magic of the right team and it just happens, you know, we have some great people and it turned out to be the right steering team we put one of the deans as a lead in the right spot, just magic started to happen. Because it was one of those things that was cross-functional by design. It was to bring everybody at the table and then we could keep all of those belief structures that we had centric to what we really wanted for it.
Joe Gottlieb:That's Roger Stanford, president of Western Technical College, highlighting the magic that happened when an empowered and representative steering committee, led by the right person, tackled the school's biggest transformation in decades, shifting to a seven-week term. We talked about how they arrived at the decision to move forward, how they centralized change management to streamline progress, how they kept the cabinet informed and involved in resolving obstacles, how they enabled but guided faculty through the instructional design process and, ultimately, how the entire institution became so proud of the results. I hope you enjoy our conversation. Welcome to, a Higher Digital podcast focused on the new whys, the new whats and the new hows in higher ed.
Joe Gottlieb:In each episode, you will experience hosts and guests pulling for the resurgence of higher ed, while identifying and discussing the best practices needed to accomplish that resurgence Culture, strategy and tactics, planning and execution, people, process and technology it's all on the menu, because that's what's required to truly transform. Hello, welcome and thanks for joining us for another episode of TRANSFORMED. My name is Joe Gottlieb, president and CTO of Higher Digital, and today I am joined by Dr Roger Stanford, president of Western Technical College. Roger, welcome to Transformed.
Dr. Roger Stanford:Thanks, Joe. I'm really happy to be here, excited. What do you want to talk about?
Joe Gottlieb:I'm glad you asked, Roger. I want to talk about your thoughts on pivoting off the strategic plan to adopt a seven-week course structure. But first I'd love to hear a bit of your background and how you got connected into the work of higher ed.
Dr. Roger Stanford:I'll be quick with it, just proud to be a, you know, 35-year educator. But you know I got a two-year degree. I work at a two-year college. I started with that in business and then I went into the military kind of a weird path, and you know there was no internet at the time. And so I'm calling an advisor back at my college, I'm getting out of the service, I'm going to go to college, and he puts me in marketing and I'm all excited, I'm getting my business degree and I found out I was in marketing education on the first day of class and I didn't even know there was such a thing as teacher education. But I stuck it out and a month later all I ever wanted to do was teach. I thought, man, this is my calling. And then, you know, you get down the path where you're still my high school teacher, then I'm a college teacher and then, you know, things turn into opportunities, into leadership, and that has moved me on my continuum. But I accidentally fell into education.
Joe Gottlieb:There's a lot of stories like that, and for all those stories it seems that the stickiness factor is high with higher ed, and I'm sure that helps you bring passion to what you do. All right, let's start out by scoping this out. A move to a seven-week course structure is a big deal, so for our listeners that may not be as familiar as you are, now take us through what that really represents as you are now.
Dr. Roger Stanford:Take us through what that really represents. Well, when you come along a decision like moving to seven-week, as we discussed with our board, it may not sound right away that that's a big deal. You're changing terms. What is the big deal with that? But for us, I mean it really is the biggest transformation that we had in decades at our organization. It really hit at every part of our organization. That required work out of every single unit in what we do and how we do and how we communicate, how we talk to people, how we move people through.
Dr. Roger Stanford:And so when you talk about a scope and we knew that it was really big and we just really were focused on how do we help completion, how do we help move this group through until they get a degree and I'm sure you know, but you can't do anything with half a respiratory therapy degree or half of a degree in auto Like. Sometimes there's a lower level job that can be there, but if you're really looking at life sustaining wages, you need the whole thing. And so we wanted to say what in the two year system are we doing that we can control? That could help more people finish? That's where the part is. There's still things that happen in someone's life that we can't control. But you know what we thought we could control more by doing this? We knew we had more part-time students than most people. We knew that their challenges were there, we knew that we had more adult students, and so we tried to look at things that we could do, and the research in seven week was just really enlightening to us. It made us really think about it and it really fit with our overall commitment to Guided Pathways, and I know that Guided Pathways has been a topic a long time on there.
Dr. Roger Stanford:But when you're really committed to the entire experience until they get their degree and for us it goes beyond that After they're working and we want to follow them further than that but you have to get them to that point, and so when I talk about scoping it, it was to make sure that that continuum was just illuminated, really, really clear, in a way that was most supportive, in a way that we believe we could get more students from a beginning point to a continuing point, to the point where they actually got a credential, and that's what's life-changing, that's the life-sustaining wages, and that's really, I'd say, where our focus was, and we had to transform.
Dr. Roger Stanford:You know, it's teaching and learning, it's advising, it's coaching, it's all the systems that support all those things, whether it's case management, whether that's the calendar, whether it's scheduling things, whether it's case management, whether that's the calendar, whether it's scheduling or how we do contracts with teachers, or our ERP background. All those things had to be part of the decision to say we're willing to break down our organization and really really take a look at everything we do and change it.
Joe Gottlieb:Well, knowing how involved that was going to be, how did you arrive at making that decision?
Dr. Roger Stanford:Well, we had a team that had proposed that this was something of interest and it's not something that you should take lightly, right. And so we put on a path to say we want something besides a white paper. We want to spend some time on this before we really go to the college with it. And we had a team that spent a year and it was a mix. We had several deans that were a part of it, with some people from student services. We had a couple of faculty and they went out and they looked at everything. They actually did some process mapping of our own processes to try to say, wow, how big would this be, what type of systems change would it be? But then what are the benefits, what are the outcomes that are out there, you know, and they brought it back to our senior team and it was still pretty secretive at that point. We're having this conversation, we're considering it, we're close, and then, you know, literally within two weeks, the pandemic hit, you know. And so we were close to a decision, but I still was stuck on a few things and I kind of think the pandemic in this case was a bit of a blessing. I will never say it's really a blessing, but it did cause a little bit more pause. It allows us to take a little bit more time, a little more thought in the change management process, in our project planning of it, so that we weren't doing it quick and hastily.
Dr. Roger Stanford:So, when it came to the decision, we spent a lot of time as a senior team discussing pros and cons. We talked about what would be and what's our conditions Are things that are absolutely we won't give on, what's our boundaries related to it inside of it. And then, personally, I sat there and struggled with what would this do for morale, right, and is this a good thing? Is it a bad thing? So I believed, clearly the data showed it was a good thing for students, but what will it do for your organization? What will it do for your organization? And to make that decision I honestly took a few nights, and there were some pretty hard nights, and so when I came back, just personally, because the decision ultimately did rest with me on this one I said I will go down this path with all of you, if you're truly going to go down this path with me, but I need a commitment that I can put in a project change manager that they will report to me that we will be the center point, because this is an academic endeavor, this is an endeavor for student services and this is an endeavor for our operations.
Dr. Roger Stanford:Everybody's got to be all in. I want it to report to me so I stay informed, but mainly so that it's not a position of power by one over the other. This means we are all in it together and the team thought it was actually a great idea. I had somebody I already wanted for it and we kind of did this little everybody write a name on a sheet of paper who they thought in the organization would be there, and nine out of 10 people had the same person, and so one of our associate deans was the right person. We made it and we did it and we had to have about a month of oh my God, how are we going to tell people? How do we announce it? What's the change management? But that's how we really came to the decision.
Joe Gottlieb:You know, in one of our prior conversations you've mentioned a little method that I would love for you to talk a little bit more about, and that is this one-to-five method. So it's a tool you use to gauge where people are in the conversation. I imagine it came up during that discussion, but would you mind just sharing that and how you've employed it on big decisions?
Dr. Roger Stanford:Yeah. So we don't usually use a traditional vote in our senior leadership team and then consensus can be a very low form of well, conflict resolution and or decision-making. But where it's been really, really helpful is when we're on something and it feels like we're there and it feels like we're all supportive. We'll say, okay, we're going to do a one to five. And that simple one just means I'm stuck, I'm not there yet, and if you jump to a five you say I'm all in, I'm all in. And then you got the degree, obviously, of a four.
Dr. Roger Stanford:Still got some questions, still a little worried, but I'm in Three. I can live with it. But boy, I know it's tough for the organization. And then the ones and twos. If there's ones and twos, we stop and we spend more time and we continue to say we need more research or we need more dialogue or we schedule more time because we don't want to really move forward. If people are at a one and a two, generally we can get people to a three if that's the case. But sometimes those ones and twos give us enough pause that we say maybe you're right, maybe we need more information before we move on, and it's really, really trusting, it's really an honest process and it's not a pressure like I'm the one holding out. It's really an honest process and it's not a pressure like I'm the one holding out. I just am worried about our culture or I'm worried about morale, or I'm worried about the workload people are going to have during this, and then we can discuss it and it helps us with a better project plan.
Joe Gottlieb:Yeah, it's a great tool. I've used something similar and you might react to this, and that is this notion of 80% agreement. 100% support is what you ultimately want to get to right, so necessarily 100. To do it 100% together is really really critical. But I like your tool as well quite a bit, and they may be combined.
Dr. Roger Stanford:Well, when you work with a board, you ask the board to say when they do actually vote, that once they vote, they will stand as one voice. Right, and they will do that. And it was the same with our team. A one and a two is just saying I'm really going to struggle to stand with all of you and to be authentic, Help me get there right. And if you take it as, help me get there and we spend the time authentically helping the people, because three and above means we're all going to stand there- no matter what level, where you are, three or five, your voice is the same standing, and that really does help us.
Joe Gottlieb:so we're unified. You could personally oversee, so that you could stay informed and help guide and drive alignment. But how else would you describe how you approached and managed this change?
Dr. Roger Stanford:Well, we decided on a few really strong upfront variables, say kind of the things that we weren't really willing to give on. We knew that there was going to be extremely strong instructional design. We knew it couldn't be just compressed. We couldn't just tell teachers, do what you were doing and do it in less time, or do it in a compressed format. We wanted to really make sure that this was our chance to rebuild every curriculum at the college, which is quite an undertaking, and we wanted to be authentic with that. And we wanted to set the boundaries on what we do for supports and how we support. We wanted to set the language that coaches would use and advisors would use that at least were in the same thing. There's still a lot of independent decision making, but this is our belief with part-time students, this is our belief with full-time students, and essentially we have a brand that we use called Every Student Every Day, and we had to define what does that mean inside of this? What does that mean inside of our commitment inside of there? And so the other commitment in the approach would be what is our formal change management process? And then how would we lead with project management and then having the right person that could actually scope that out, that could just do process mapping and lay that out. And we had, I'm going to say again, the luxury of a pandemic, and that's not a luxury, but because it was such a weird time in history when we made the decision, we put a three-year time period very intentionally. I wanted to let our faculty that were in the weirdest time of their life have a full year to just work through this pandemic. I didn't want them to do a lot of work and a lot of stress and a lot of worrying. But as a leadership team, as a management group, we could be doing a lot of infrastructure stuff in the background, continuing some research, finding what other colleges have used it, what type would our ERP work, or do we need a new ERP system? You know we had to scope all those other variables which gave us a ton of opportunity and left our faculty alone at that moment. But we also had to define when we get to faculty, when we get to this group or this team. We would have to do it.
Dr. Roger Stanford:The other approach that I would say is really central is we created very early on, as soon as we had, the change manager and time manager. We had to set a steering committee and you know people do those things all the time but we wanted an empowered steering committee. We didn't want the senior team every week having to manage all of the different pieces that are part of this, because the truth is, we needed to worry about the policy shifts and changes. We didn't need to worry about nuts and bolts and we put several of the senior leaders were on it.
Dr. Roger Stanford:But when we created the magic of the right team and it just happens, you know, we have some great people and it turned out to be the right steering team we put one of the deans as a lead was now vice president of academics in the right spot. Just magic started to happen. Because it was one of those things that was cross-functional by design. It was to bring everybody at the table and then we could keep all of those belief structures that we had centric to what we really wanted for it. So you know, there's a lot of pieces that approach to that, a lot of real specifics, but that was some of our passion was the empowerment piece, but yet have a center of what we believe in.
Joe Gottlieb:So I'm going to double click on one piece of that because I think it'll be pertinent for our listeners. So you created a steering committee that you really empowered to make this happen, so that your cabinet where there was a few members, I think in both places, but the broad cabinet could focus on policies and not have to worry about the nuts and bolts. I think that's really good framing, Similar to how you took a personal role in driving the change manager across the entire scope of your institution. How did your cabinet stay in tune with the work of the steering committee so that, like you, they were informed, they felt like they were in a position to come up to speed where necessary and to continue to support the overall effort, versus find themselves just out of reflex reacting to some change because they were caught flat-footed?
Dr. Roger Stanford:Yeah, I'm really glad you asked it because we did make one really intentional piece to make sure it you know it moved through met our strategic goals, followed. Our guided pathways model is, I moved some people onto the senior leadership in a temporary capacity, a two-year commitment, and so we expanded our senior team. That's our cabinet, we call it senior leadership team and we had not had our CIO. For example, our person from IT who's amazing, right, the steering committee lead was a dean. We added another person in that, so we added another voice in that. Directly on there, we brought our person that leads our data, our institutional data, our institutional research team, but we brought them directly onto that team because that was key. And then we brought our enrollment manager on and so, because all those things had to really be in sync, that really represented all of them and yeah, I have all the vice presidents there, but those are really the boots on the ground people that were going to make these things happen.
Dr. Roger Stanford:Now, the steering committee had a lot of associate deans, coordinators, schedulers, other people that were out there, but that way we made sure that we were integrated at this level. But it also brought where the struggles were. It also brought the avenue for IT and student services to kind of have this at senior leadership to say here's where we're struggling at this point. We need to make a decision on this and we felt we had the right people at the table. We need to make a decision on this and we felt we had, you know, the right people at the table. We still brought in guests you still bring in when it's an issue.
Dr. Roger Stanford:So we went a little beyond our policy norm that we would be at, but that's how we did. It was bringing some of those people from the steering committee directly on the senior team. Some of them now have stayed on. A couple of them are actually just finally exiting here in July because we felt we'd kept them on because it's of value until we fully engaged and fully moved through that. But it really did add to the senior team.
Joe Gottlieb:Sounds like a really sensible approach, one that could, particularly if the entire organization was committed, which is what you started with, was committed, which is what you started with, and therefore, with that infrastructure in place, you enabled the flow of shared understanding of what was going on, and everyone was committed, I imagine, to identify blockers and work them out right, because, if point one's true, as you encounter the inevitable obstacles, you surface them and you resolve them right.
Dr. Roger Stanford:Yeah, absolutely. There was just one more point that just stands out on this question, you know, on the approach, and that is just really around instructional design and really a commitment to teaching and learning. When you look at guided pathways and there's a line that says ensure learning, you could say every college ensures learning, every teacher is great and everybody does their. But what's the science of teaching and learning? We hire expert welders, we hire expert nurses, but how good are we at that part and how do we marry that? And I have a lot of trust of a teacher that's been here for 20 years. But we all can continue to grow.
Dr. Roger Stanford:So we made some really intentional pieces because we had over a thousand courses that we wanted to completely convert. We had we had every single program go through a complete program review, you know, because they couldn't add any credits during this. In fact, most of them had to reduce credits. We had made a decision as far as approach that we were going to have a strengths class, that everybody took a one credit strength, student strengths class. You know, when you make those things, you want to, you want to be very intentional in the design and the curriculum.
Dr. Roger Stanford:And I will say, the most beautiful thing of everything that we did and all of the work that's together is, I will tell you, while it was hard for our faculty to come in for two summers in a row and do some pretty intense work, they've never been so proud of the curriculums that they have.
Dr. Roger Stanford:They've never been so proud of their assessments and how aligned they are. They've never been so proud of the curriculums that they have. They've never been so proud of their assessments and how aligned they are throughout their program, knowing that their relationship with general education has never been better. Because they've worked through every one of those decisions the right course, the right time, the right sequence, where they're at and where their support are. And when you talk about the approach, we insisted that that would be there and so we also insisted by some time commitment of our faculty. It was hard, it was very tough, it was different, but I would tell you the pride as you walk around now as they're rolling out these curriculums they're really proud of their work, they're really proud of those changes.
Joe Gottlieb:It sounds to me like the circumstance it was a little bit of a perfect storm here. The circumstance, the need to get to an outcome, you know the pandemic, the way you approach the structure, the time that you took to do it thoughtfully and most notably, I think, for the faculty, where everyone's talked about how academic freedom and, you know, letting faculty be free to innovate and all those things sometimes produces an atmosphere where giving them guidance or trying to help them with improvements is anathema. It just doesn't fit. There's a collision there. But it sounds to me like the notion that instructional design experts were presented in a way where faculty felt it reasonably enhancing. Yes, there was a commitment to work, but they all got this wonderful injection of an external discipline which I imagine helped every single course get better.
Dr. Roger Stanford:Yeah, when you look at Wisconsin as a technical college state, we are competency aligned and so from a teaching and learning perspective, there's a competency and a demonstrate that there's a clear instructional design model that we use. That's there. So it's not strange to anybody when you talk about academic freedom. There was some early questions. Most of the conflicts were not about the fact that we wanted to redesign programs and we wanted them to do the tough work Like accredited programs have been through all this stuff right. But now everybody had to look at it was the fact that they were so busy in the regular classes and doing dual work. That's where most of our struggles were. I don't think a lot of people argue with that.
Dr. Roger Stanford:We wanted to embed universal design, because we're redoing it all. That we wanted to talk about culturally relevant curriculum. That we wanted to relook at gen ed outcomes, or we call them core abilities, and then refit them and realign them. So we weren't just compressing. I don't think there was a lot of arguments that we could all work together and have a better system. They accepted instructional design. They accepted the faculty coaching. We embedded all those pieces that we have. The faculty development overall was really, really strong. It's just, it's a tremendous amount of time and we got another year plus of this. As we look at second year curriculums and stuff, they're still deeply in that, but there's a lot of pride that has come with it now and probably some of the most competent teachers you could have in a system like that, because everybody grew and I mean everybody grew in this and I'm pretty proud of their work.
Joe Gottlieb:Sounds like it Sounds wonderful. Okay, how did Western Technical College leverage its culture to accomplish this significant change? I want to talk specifically about culture. Normally we would start with that, but because your methods were so specific, I wanted to go there first. But now let's bring it around and talk about culture.
Dr. Roger Stanford:Yeah, so ironically, right before we made this call, we had published a culture statement and that was about 275 people at the college. We had a huge process where, like, what does it mean to be a great place to work for one thing? And so what's our destination? Where do we want to be? And we're not saying we fully lived it, but we had a destination and while it turned into something, I didn't write it, I just asked us to create it and it turned into something pretty beautiful and it's kind of long and I won't read the whole thing about who we believe, but I got to tell you in the end it talks about that we have unconditional positive regard for each other and that as we work together, we do that from a place of respect. And it has all kinds of other things about empowerment, our love for students, all kinds of beautiful things. But I will tell you, when you look at culture and you're going to go through tough things where IT is here and student services are here, instructional designers and coaches and a faculty are here or this department in general education, they're not always in sync, but when you can use that culture statement to say unconditional positive regard, we believe that everybody's here for the best of intentions. We believe everybody's here wanting the best for our students. We may interpret it differently, but there's often some way in there where we have the same beliefs and we can get there, and I think it was really important for us.
Dr. Roger Stanford:A couple other culture things I think about, you know, when it comes into this, just constant communication, being open for people, letting people air it out. You know, we had a previous conversation where I said, you know, I told our board we're going to have some people leave over this. We're going to have some people that disagree with the instructional design. They don't think it can happen. We're going to have some people retire because they're going to say it might be a good idea, but I'm too far along. I don't want to be the person. But what I didn't want to have is have 40 or 50 people walk out at one time. And you know that's a culture. That's when we're just boom, we're just colliding with it. And so I think the intentionality of a lot of the work we do helped us a lot.
Dr. Roger Stanford:We did probably have, you know, 10, a dozen that left purely because this was a design not for them. I had told the board. That was part of the risk. We were willing to accept that. This was. We're that committed to those students to do that. And then we had quite a few retirements, maybe a year or two ahead of time, which was hard for me because these are long-term people that have so much to offer. It's hard to see that. But I also get you're like, it's my last year, I don't think I want to do that work. Hire someone, they'll do that work and the program will be better. And so I felt pretty good about that one.
Dr. Roger Stanford:And you know, on it we had a lot of open door things. You know we just had to have. I had to go on a listening tour with one of my VPs and we had to just go and listen to faculty, for example in groups of eight or less, and just hear it out. And some of it was pretty painful and some of it was pretty hard and most of it was pretty real. And then we had to try to mitigate some of those things that were a lot of pressures that were on there. And so you know, I don't think we have the perfect culture here, but we have a pretty good one that cares about people and we're a pretty, we're a nice culture, we're a kind culture and why we tested ourselves the unconditional positive guard, I think really pulled us through. So overall, you know, generally a pretty positive experience inside of it.
Joe Gottlieb:So you've completed a full year since you transitioned to the seven-week structure. How was that first year and what did you learn?
Dr. Roger Stanford:The first year was pretty intense, beautiful, like there was some immediate benefits that shocked us. I sat with the president that did it like six years ago, about a year and a half ago, and he said what you're going to be shocked at is how quickly you see your second term retention change and you're like, okay, I hope so, I hope so. But then kind of forgot about that and we're working on this. But while it was anecdotal on that first term, you had just people just saying, wow, our January starts, for example, we're a trimester and we built in two seven-week sessions in each trimester, so now we would have two sessions done and it would be like our second term start and it was just notable. It was notable in some enrollment numbers. It was notable to our faculty because they felt like, where I had 20, I still have 20 signing up in this next term, or 19, where sometimes that was 12, right, and so there was some really nice notable things in there.
Dr. Roger Stanford:I can't say that we knew everything or that all the evidence said it was perfect. We still had some classes that maybe need to stay 15 weeks and some classes that can move down to the seven weeks, and so we have those things. But there was just a beautiful piece where it worked. You know it was working and I'm running into teachers that are saying I like it. I saw Facebook posts from some of our instructors that, like I am surprised. This calendar is really nice because the cognitive load it helps the students can also help your teachers. Now I have one now that had four classes and one mini session and that was way too much. But for the most part they were able to build a schedule based on their systems that they never taught more than two things at one time, schedule based on their systems that they never taught more than two things at one time, or maybe there's three. But their cognitive load was better and so I got to tell you. There was just a kind of a pleasant wow.
Dr. Roger Stanford:Ir is still, you know, doing the measurements. We're still doing our first year review. We have our kind of annual data in our state that will tell you. But it was kind of a lot of celebration. The hard part is the ERP. We had a lot of systems change. That stuff is still going. We still are manually doing a little too much that we're still building the system for and we're getting there. It's still working. That just doesn't get done in one day, but as far as a launch, surprisingly it worked and I still feel like I'm smiling from it. I still, overall, get smiles from people that are in it, even though they go this one class. It doesn't work, but all the other ones did and we could work on that.
Joe Gottlieb:I can feel it in your voice. It sounds like a resounding success. All right, in summary, what three takeaways can we offer our listeners on the topic of pivoting off the strategic plan to adopt a seven-week course structure?
Dr. Roger Stanford:Well, after you do all that homework right, you set up your system and you make the commitments. You got to do all that on the front end and everybody knows, before you decide it, I will say is when you communicate and as you communicate and as you continue to communicate, be very committed, be very proactive, open for feedback, but create a continuous loop of communication so that there's not any miscommunication and it still happens but being there is really, really important. And that communicating with all levels of leadership because they got to stand for all these beliefs and we made some early mistakes on that we caught up, we got better. But I will say communicate as an anchor. I will say the change management and project management commitment from the start.
Dr. Roger Stanford:Really having a designated person I believe they report to the president is key so that there is no power shift between it's an academic thing or a student services thing. You can't have that. And so I will say I think that was really the right call inside of there and, of course, we had the right person with it. And maybe the last one is really empowering people Now. We did it through a steering committee, we did it through here's the instructional design variables, here's where your decisions are made. Here's where you have deadlines and crosses and you have to get them, but you make sure that there's empowerment and decision-making for people all the way through it. And I believe we did a pretty solid job of doing all those things. A lot of things we learned, a lot of things we could do better, but those would be the three things I would say stay focused on.
Joe Gottlieb:Great summary, Roger.
Dr. Roger Stanford:thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you, this has truly been a pleasure.
Joe Gottlieb:And thanks to our listeners for joining us as well. I hope you have a great day and we'll look forward to hosting you again on the next episode of Transformed. Hey, listeners of Transformed, I hope you enjoyed that episode and, whether you did or not, I hope that made you stop and think about the role that you were playing in your organization's ability to change in the digital era. And if it made you stop and think, perhaps you would be willing to share your thoughts, suggestions, alternative perspectives or even criticisms related to this or any other episode. I would love to hear from you, so send me an email at info@ higher. digital or joe@ higher. digital, and if you have friends or colleagues that you think might enjoy it, please share our podcast with them, as you and they can easily find Transformed is available wherever you get your podcasts.
