At the end of the Capacity and Preparatory Review phase, the Core Commitment I research team concluded that the CSULB community values organizational decentralization and collaborative decision making. To improve the effectiveness of communication and decision-making, the campus community favors clear lines of authority, simplified reporting lines, and clearly defined responsibilities for both the Division of Academic Affairs and the Academic Senate.
For the Educational Effectiveness Review, the Core Commitment I team will undertake research on two questions designed to improve the overall effectiveness of campus communication and decision-making. These are:
The plan of work for these research questions are as follows.
This will entail a review of existing information and communication media and venues, including (but not limited to):
(*) Online versions available
During this phase of the research, it is anticipated that additional venues for communication and information will be discovered, from the unit or program level up to the division level. The research will focus especially on what avenues exist for the communication to the campus of information, especially concerning enrollment management and new technology, and how this decentralized campus can be organized most effectively for multi-directional communication, that is, not only from the top down, but also from the bottom up and from colleagues and peers, students, and other stakeholders.
Once all the extant avenues for communication have been identified, important campus groups (students, faculty, staff, administrators) will be selected and surveyed as to their knowledge of, use of, and/or opinion of these media and their effectiveness. There may be web-based surveys, interviews, or focus groups, depending on the nature of the constituency and the exact information of interest.
The Core Commitment I team will collect and analyze the data, and compare the responses obtained in phase 2 to the information obtained in the phase 1. This may result in recommendations for how communication can become more effective, for example, by shrinking the number of media to reduce the possible conflicts in message or to simply save scarce resources in a time of shrinking budgets; or recommendation of new avenues of communication, especially concerning enrollment management and new technology, such as forums, town halls, wikis, or other means. Recommendations will be made keeping in mind the campus preference for decentralization and consensus-building but also recognizing that the pace of decision-making is accelerating in this 21st century environment of higher education.
