Collaborative Development of Alumni Ambassador Training

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The Office of Enrollment Management is collaborating with eLearning and Instructional Support on a new initiative to develop online training for their growing group of Alumni Ambassadors. Alumni Ambassadors serve as volunteer recruiters in their communities, helping to spread the word about Lesley University programs.  Liana Caffrey, Director of Alumni Volunteer Recruitment and Shirley Chin, Assistant Director are leading the effort in collaboration with eLearning and Instructional Support (eLIS) staff members Robyn Belair, John McCormick, and Bill Porter.

This project is driven by a rapidly growing need for training of Alumni Ambassadors who come from 15 states and cannot always attend the yearly face-to-face training. There are currently 250 Ambassadors and we continue to add ambassadors each week. The initial phase of the training development is expected to be completed this semester, and the project team plans to pilot both online components and in-the-field support aids, with an eye towards improving the training through real-world use at college fairs and other venues for recruitment. Here’s an example of a testimonial from one our Ambassador’s, Terry:

If you want to know more about our work with the Office of Enrollment Management and Liana’s team, please contact Liana at x 8201 or lcaffrey at lesley [dot] edu or John McCormick at 8261 or jmccormi at lesley [dot] edu.

Lesley Joins Generation Study Abroad

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Lesley has joined the nationwide Generation Study Abroad initiative that seeks to double the number of students (undergraduate and graduate) who engage in a study/research abroad program.  For Spring 2015, these experiences across the University have included trips to the Dominican Republic, Paris, London, South Andros, and Mexico.  Claire Carroll, Director of Study Abroad, forged new partnerships this year that helped bring students to Lesley this Spring from Sogang University in Seoul, Korea and Centennial College, Hong Kong.  Our first exchange students from new partner Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan will be sending us two students for the 2015-16 year.

Find us on Facebook: The Global Education Center at Lesley University

FERPA Compliance

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The following are observations and recommendations from Lesley’s General Counsel that faculty and staff should follow to remain in compliance with FERPA:

  1. The FERPA rules and guidelines prohibit universities from disclosing student education records like grades and evaluative comments to third parties without a student’s permission.
  2. Some email systems are vulnerable to interception.
  3. Because communications between faculty and students posted on the Blackboard learning management system remain with the Blackboard system, these communications are much more secure than non-Lesley email systems, and are somewhat more secure than the Lesley email system.
  4. Faculty are encouraged to use Blackboard Grade Center to post grades and evaluative comments:
    • This is the better practice, and should be particularly observed with respect to transmitting grades.
    • Posting feedback and grades to Blackboard Grade Center ensures that only the intended student can access his or her grades and evaluations within a secure Internet connection.
    • Blackboard does have a feature that permits annotations of written work.
  5. In the meantime, for those who are more comfortable using email messages to communicate evaluative comments to students:
    • Those email messages should be sent to and from lesley.edu addresses only.
    • If a student sends you a paper from a non-lesley.edu account, you should respond by using the student’s lesley.edu address only.
    • You should not forward emails from lesley.edu to your personal email accounts if the email messages contain personally identifiable information or student records.
    • If you have reason to believe that someone other than your student has access to your student’s email account, do not send anything to that email address
    • Do not allow anyone else to have access to your lesley.edu email account.
  6. GoogleDocs and other services are not secure, are not subject to contracts with the university, and we should not put student information on those sites or services (the attached FAQ addresses a few questions related to this).  Note also that anything placed on GoogleDocs and other services may be “data mined” by Google or the service company.

More information is available in this FERPA Questions and Answers March 2015

 

Global Center Updates

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The Global Center at 7 Mellen is bustling with activity this fall. New exchange agreements with Centennial College in Hong Kong, SoGang in South Korea, and Osaka Commerce University in Japan, were recently signed — and we already expect several students from Sogang to join us in January. The Urban Scholars have a new home as part of the Global Center joining CLAS foreign language faculty and interns from the International Higher Education/Intercultural Relations program. The global center has become a multi-cultural, multi-lingual home for a community of global scholars, and we are eager to grow and expand our programs and supports. On Wednesday evening, October 8th the center hosted a social gathering for international students. In addition, we’re in the process of hiring a new Director of International Student Recruitment and Success for the Global Center. We look forward to extending our reach further for comprehensive internationalization.

Academic Catalogs Are Now Online and Searchable

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A truly “out with the old and in with the new” project was undertaken this summer to streamline the 2014-15 academic catalog production process. This work spanned multiple departments and involved the complete overhaul and installation of an updated web-based system. This area now houses all of the catalog data and is accessible via a much more user-friendly interface. Updates for later catalogs may now be made quickly and efficiently by the individuals who were trained on the SmartCatalog system. In addition, we now have access to online versions of the undergraduate and graduate catalogs, which are completely searchable.