Cordance today announced its acquisition of Strategic Planning Online LLC. (SPOL) of Coral Springs, Florida. This new relationship will allow SPOL management and employees the opportunity to benefit directly from the many years of expertise of the Cordance team and allows SPOL the advantage of Cordance’s financial resources to help scale the company.

Institutions of Higher Education (IHE) produce inspiring vision and mission statements, strategic plans, academic master plans, strategic enrollment plans, campus master plans, and many others; but if these plans do not align with how resources are actually allocated, they are merely “plans on a shelf” and not the living documents that IHE’s need to satisfy regional accreditors and stakeholders. 

Have you ever dreamed of a solution to your Institutional Effectiveness (IE) challenges, but then realized that there are institutional barriers to your success?  We have all been to conferences where we sit in the audience listening to an institution present an amazing “Best Practice” in IE, only to realize that it would never work at our institution due to organizational inertia. Organizational inertia is the tendency of an institution to continue on its current trajectory due to resource or routine rigidity.

As academic departments work to create rubrics and other measurement tools, defining “quality” at the student performance level is especially elusive. Software can emulate these tools and faculty can enter results, but in a virtual environment are faculty meeting to discuss and assess the aggregate data? Or are they simply letting software compile a final score and trusting that overall students are successful or not successful?

The COVID pandemic threw institutions worldwide for a loop in 2020. It’s safe to say that every higher education institution, small or large, private or public, had some sort of local strategic plan in place. However, those plans more often than not were either COVID modified or completely revamped because of the need to re-examine goals and objectives for planned initiatives, ongoing projects, and program development.

Verifying faculty credentialing is an essential part of any institutional or programmatic process, as it ensures that any individual instructor is qualified to teach a particular subject. Without verification of credentials, you can’t assure academic quality, regardless of how popular an instructor might rate by her students.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, institutions have quickly adopted online learning environments. The move online promotes social distance and safety for students and staff, especially as the coronavirus outbreak continues to grow. This move also provides institutions with the unique opportunity to modernize their assessment processes.

Below, we share some insight into how your institution can incorporate assessment into your online learning environment and why the move online can help your faculty get more done without extra effort.

Pivoting resources to respond to change, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, is essential for today’s higher education institutions. Not only must your institution shift funding quickly, but it must also continue to plan and allocate resources for the future.

Below, we share a few considerations as your institution reevaluates resources to meet the needs to students and faculty during this challenging time.

The COVID-19 pandemic has palpably reshaped lives and businesses. Higher education, in particular, has found itself pivoting rapidly to ensure safety, adjust myriad processes, maintain academic rigor, drive administrative productivity, and keep institutions on mission.

A toolkit introduced to the North Dakota University System’s 11 public colleges and universities has taken a few steps forward.

According to Ryan Jockers, institutional and strategic analytics coordinator at the NDUS system office, the cloud-based planning SPOL software was purchased after the launch of the State Board of Higher Education’s strategic plan. SPOL was determined to be the best fit to further SBHE goals for the system, as well as track metrics of success. Additionally, the SPOL platform helps address prior concerns on documenting evidence related to increased performance of operations.