Priorities:William Jewell College Strategic Priorities

Priority 1: Promoting Student Voice & Events

Paperless @ Jewell

Recent campus changes have brought about a new “library of the 21st century,” the Pryor Learning Commons (PLC). The PLC has revolutionized the way our campus works with regards to reducing paper waste and fully embraces its role as a “paperless building.” However, many traditional modes of student communication such as flyers are disallowed from buildings that are paperless. The advent of social media has not stemmed the problem, but has in some ways exacerbated it. Students invite their existing social connections to events, and a broader audience effectively cannot be reached by an organization looking to expand its outreach efforts. However, new efforts like the program called JewellVerse may be a viable avenue for the production of a technological solution to this problem.

JewellVerse is an initiative begun this school year, in which every student, faculty, and staff has an iPad, enabling a single-device synergy that empowers mobile technology in and around the classroom. Professors are beginning to integrate digital materials into their pedagogical approaches in new ways, and the technology is facilitating collaboration and a spread of ideas that previously would have been too arduous to orchestrate without a unified device ecosystem.

The gradual transition that many colleges and universities have seen towards working in a digital environment is more complete at Jewell than at many comparable institutions. This presents an interesting dilemma: as the learning curve of a digital campus becomes easier and easier, William Jewell College is experiencing the advantages of working in a digital environment. At the same time, many of the historical means by which students market organizational activities rely on paper and printers, which have perhaps the widest accessibility of any classroom technology ever. Developing digital solutions to work in a digital ecosystem can take a substantial investment of time and energy, and there are few people capable of software development. We consider a Lean approach to this problem, where the problem will be validated, key stakeholder input will be collected, resources identified, and a fail-fast, agile approach to development will be taken.

Marketing to Advance Innovation and Entrepreneurship

The solution identified through Lean customer interviews involves creating an application to replace the existing “#jewellplc” Twitter feed TV that would include additional content feeds, particularly calendar/event feeds for organizations. On a TV, the application would scroll through content and change feeds from Twitter to Instagram to Campus Events. The same framework that has been used to prototype this project can be used to develop mobile applications, and could lead to an iPad version of the project complete with push notifications of new events.

One key consideration is how this project can help advance innovation and entrepreneurship on campus. Primarily, this project aims to increase collision frequency. This is a key predictive metric for innovation and the exchange of ideas. By catalyzing a broader campus involvement, the culture of William Jewell College becomes a better environment for sharing ideas. As a liberal arts institution, William Jewell has a diverse group of interdisciplinary thinkers, makers, and researchers. We aim to improve our “return on collisions,” as Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh phrases it in his talk about the Downtown Project in Las Vegas, embracing three core elements: Collision, Co-learning, and Connectedness. These are crucial for entrepreneurial mindsets and creative thinking to flourish.

Another way that this can help our campus entrepreneurs is through establishing policies that would allow not only student organizations and staff to utilize the board, but also student entrepreneurs seeking to promote their ventures. By having an established channel, the awareness of entrepreneurship at Jewell will help normalize the idea that students are capable of designing and running a startup, combatting the currently risk-averse nature of the student body.

As for any communications channel, it is important that the spirit of William Jewell College is conveyed as a part of our message. Our commitments to academic excellence, experiential learning, and service would be furthered by connecting students to resources such as the Academic Achievement Center, Office of Global Studies, and Center for Justice and Sustainability. This helps these infrastructural elements of William Jewell get closer to students’ everyday lives.

Campus Data

In the development of this project, many streams of data will be consumed and placed into the application. One side effect of this process is that the data feeds could be made available to students. Innovation benefits from an open campus data policy, adhering to ideas such as those stated by the Campus Data initiative. By bringing this sort of openness to the “JewellVerse” program, student makers and innovators would have the opportunity to do civic-hacking-style projects and improve their campus community.

Priority 2: Leveraging Research Internships & Industry Mentorship

William Jewell College students, researchers, and entrepreneurs struggle to gain industry experience with their academic projects and curriculum that would be necessary for long-term pursuits. Projects are used to benefit the students education in an academic setting but does not benefit the invested student in  being more marketable for a future career. By accessing the distinguished alumni, local business owners, and professionals of all trade to help guide these academic projects would help students develop professional relationship, a future mentor, and skills for the industry.

More or less, students participate in outstanding academic research and work while being students of William Jewell College. However to integrate these projects into internships with local business owners and entrepreneurs, students would gain an understanding of how their education and work is used in a job setting. These relationships with students would develop a possible mentorship.

Taking Initiative

To guide a better mentor and internship program for student to excel their research experience a preliminary study needs to be conducted to assess how many students are participating in research. The hardest part of starting this initiative will be finding enough people in the industry to accept this task of advising students through research or projects. 

Students who want to gain a stronger set of skills for working in the industry would talk to their department faculty about doing research through a business or mentor program. The research project itself can be determined through the faculty and student; or it can be discussed between the student and mentor to decide how their research can best play into their future in the industry to formulate what the project should be. Preferrably, the project would end up being very similar or exactly like an internship but with integrated reserach. 

These types of research internship and industrial mentorships would provide students with a greater netowrk of how their education and studies will benefit in a future career path. Ultimately, this would prepare the student, researcher, and future entrepreneur with a more broad understanding of how their knowledge is used to innovate in an industry that is constantly changing for new ways and ideas. 

Difference

A research internship would be similar but not exactly like any other type of research or internship. By combining the two aspects of research and an internship, there is a level of learning to adapt previous knowledge with constant change of a competitive industry. Students will learn to be more innovative to succeed in this competitive atmosphere. This type of learning is something that can not be replicated in the academic reserach facility. The mentoring business will benefit from acquiring the student's research for innovative thinking and problem solving. 

Priority 3: Developing Innovative Curricular Endeavors

William Jewell College Students and Faculty have had difficulty starting large-scale projects with longevity and a diverse set of smaller interdisciplinary avenues/projects due to the lack of student and faculty body support. Students face barriers of hard-to-inspire colleagues and professors that have begun accepting the status quo. Students, Faculty, and staff have succumbed to excessive risk aversion. Facilitating the creation of large scale projects that utilize the resources of the local community and the forged relationships between students and faculty will invigorate the innovative and entrepreneurial spirit and results of the College.

More specifically, the curriculum at Jewell is lacking interdisciplinary projects in all majors. Jewell should launch broad projects, with smaller projects intertwined that students can complete over their four year college career. These said projects would give students experience that would have a quantifiable solution to use to market themselves as they enter the job world in the future. This solution would not only benefit the student but also the beneficiaries of the project. For example if a broad project taken on by the college was to reduce poverty in Kansas City, then the small project would have to show a reduction in poverty on some quantitative level. A small project could be a psychology demographic research project of residents in Kansas City living in poverty. Finally, the college and faculty would benefit from a curriculum change such as this. Even as it would be more work, for faculty it would allow the college to be able to have marketing solutions and have a more concrete way of showing successful community outreach.

Task 1: Collecting Initial Data

The first task is to complete research and map the demographics and plausibility of this proposal. As we talk to more faculty and students, we will learn more potential problems. Therefore the first task will be a base survey to collect and sort aggregate data as to the amount of support both from the college and for the surrounding community.

Task 2: Developing Policy

Drafting a white page document that will serve as a formal proposal is the most important process. During this drafting process we will use expert insight into legal and contractual requirements. Eventually this document will be overhauled by student, faculty, and community leader committees before submitting the document to administration of the college.

Task 3: Launching Initiative

Once support has been mapped, the next goal is start the marketing process. This will be done through social media, and campus engagement at first. Then later we will have a launch day where funding will be used to incentivize attendance and a website for the initiative will also be launched on this launch day.

Priority 4: Interdisciplinary Communication

Tactic 1: Building Relationships

Building relationships with leadership and faculty will allow for a means of entry into the faculty communication circle. Reaching out to faculty and attend a faculty meeting to open conversation about how William Jewell College can move from "polydisciplinary" - in which students are simultaneously engaged in many disciplines - to truly "interdiscplinary" - in which faculty and students connect disparate ideas and have investment in programs beyond the department.

Tactic 2: Pitching Interdisciplinary Ideas

Communicating between areas of study and departments for the purpose of collaboration will benefit the community by expanding the effects of the liberal arts approach at William Jewell College. Inviting faculty from other departments to lectures, shadow a class, collaborate on curriculum, and share ideas are the objectives of interdepartmental communication. For example, if a class is discussing a subject that relates to that of another discipline, it could be enriching to bring a faculty member from the other department to speak on the subject. Furthermore, if a department had a program that could be of interest to a student outside the major, faculty to faculty communication could facilitate communicating this program to their students.

Tactic 3: Unifying Silos

As students have expressed, they feel comfortable communicating with faculty in their own discipline, but are hesitant to contact those who are not in their disciple. Breaking down silos that block communication could aid in encouraging students talking to faculty in other disciplines. As William Jewell is a liberal arts institution, it is a goal of the college to create well rounded individuals who value critical thinking. This goal can be facilitated through accessibility to the whole faculty, not just those in one's department.

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