I would like to welcome all faculty, staff, and students back for another academic year. It has been a very busy summer with many faculty working on the college’s transformation, students and faculty studying abroad, faculty identifying grand challenges in a research workshop, and our staff working hard on meeting our enrollment targets and getting everything ready for the start of fall classes.
This is a critical year for the college as we continue our efforts to transform the learning environment and increase our efforts to grow our research programs. All of our academic units have made good progress in each of the 10 elements of our transformation, and some have met our transformation targets in as many as seven of the 10 elements. I encourage all faculty to continue to contribute to as many elements as possible, and I would like to give special mention to the three elements which will make our learning experience truly transformational:
- Integration of learning across course and disciplinary boundaries (integrated learning-in-context curricula).
- The integration of the humanities and social sciences, enabling students to learn these topics in context and as a means to improve their creativity, problem solving, and communications skills.
- Competency-based education as a foundation for all our programs.
In research, we need to identify key grand challenges that we as a college would like to address and slowly start bending our research efforts towards these challenges. The grand challenges will be broad enough so that all our faculty can identify with and, in some cases, contribute to more than one grand challenge.
As a reflection of our strong marketing and recruiting efforts and because our units are offering some very popular and, in some cases, relatively new programs, our enrollment continues to increase. We are welcoming over 800 new beginners in West Lafayette! This is perhaps the finest endorsement we could receive, and it is something in which every one of us can take pride. At the same time, the number of students registered at our locations throughout the state also increased from this time last year, as did the number of students applying for our programs in these nine cities. There is a lot of good news here!
Finally, discussions about reorganizing the college began in early 2017 and are continuing. The realignment affects our computing programs in CIT and CGT, our core TECH courses, our transdisciplinary studies in technology program, and the programs aligned under TLI and ET. Faculty are assessing the merits of various parts that are not yet finalized. I trust that the plan developed earlier this year, with some minor adjustments if necessary, will result in a more effectively aligned organization that will strengthen our academic programs.
I wish you all much success in the coming academic year. Thank you for your continued excellent work.
