The Title III grant work is moving forward! On July 1, Kate Gold started as the Director of Retention to help Carlow increase retention and graduation rates. Kate has over 15 years of experience leading retention initiatives at Vermont State University.
Over the next few months, Kate will be
Meet Kate (virtually) in her message below!
We had a record-breaking number of people attending the Summer Institute for this year's topic on Universal Design for Learning! Over 50 people participated in the two-day event!
With the Title III funding, we brought in Loui Lord Nelson, PhD, international scholar and consultant on UDL, as our keynote speaker. She also hosted a workshop on using the guidelines to inform our teaching practices.
In addition, we had 10 faculty members share what they are currently doing to incorporate the UDL guidelines into their own courses, including
It was great to spend time learning from each other! If you missed the event, you can catch the replays here.
Faculty take-aways from the Summer Institute include
The most asked question was: "Will there be more training/professional development on UDL?" The second was: "Will be bring Loui back?" The answer to both is: "Absolutely!" Stay tuned for more details in the coming weeks!
As the spring semester was winding down, the campus community was invited to participate in learning more about student success software and how it can help us improve retention and persistence rates. Those demos were shared in April and early May, with opportunities to provide feedback.
The decision was made to purchase Navigate360, using Title III funds, because it is the leading software system that integrates with our current IT infrastructure. Some of the advantages Navigate360 implementation will bring include the ability to better coordinate and track student outreach and interventions, to close the loop on communications and alerts, to assess the efficacy of those efforts, and to provide a secure method for sharing case notes from faculty advisors and student affairs staff.
The implementation process is revving up now, with the goal to "go live" with campus-wide adoption in Fall 2025. In July 2024, the Title III team met with our EAB strategic leader, Ginny Walters, and started to map out both a desired timeline and who the key players need to be in the initial setup phases. Ginny is excited to be working with us, as her family has long ties to Carlow and Pittsburgh, though she's located in the upper Midwest now.
EAB has also assigned two technical specialists to work with our IT team on campus. Stacey Osterman and her crew met with them on August 1st to discuss the technical and data needs and brainstorm the best path forward. EAB provides a high level of technical support and has a proven track record of safe-guarding institutional data for hundreds of colleges and universities, which makes them such a strong partner for Carlow in this phase. Pending a few executive-level decisions, we'll be starting that side of the work soon.
Our next steps will be to engage with what EAB refers to as "care units"—the departments and individuals who provide student-facing support—to decide what information and resources should be included in the first wave of implementation.
We will spend the next few months identifying those areas where a software solution will improve our workflow and communication across various stakeholders involved in retention efforts. A pilot program is slated to start in the spring with a full launch in Fall 2025.
Stay tuned!
Information on Navigate360, including recordings from implementation meetings, supporting documents, partnership resources, research and infographics, and a communications toolkit are all available on the new Title III tab on the CTRL website.
We are pleased to announce that Kate Gold has joined the Carlow community as the Director of Retention in the new Office of Student Retention! Kate joined the CTRL team in July, and has already proven to be an asset to our department. If you see her around campus, please take a moment to introduce yourself!
We invite you to take a moment to read this note from Kate about what brings her to Pittsburgh and her hopes for the Office of Student Retention:
Greetings! I'm very happy to be joining the Carlow community as the new Director of Retention under the Title III grant. I have managed to meet quite a few folks since I started at the beginning of July, but am looking forward to getting to know the students and faculty better as the fall term kicks off!
For those I haven't met yet, I'd love to share a little about my background and what I'm hoping to accomplish in the first few months at Carlow. I'm a Pittsburgh native returning after spending 30 years away. Every day I'm marveling at all the familiar places that are still trucking along relatively unchanged and also at all the growth (and demolition!) that has happened in the intervening years. My two children—ages 10 and 14—are gradually adjusting from rural Vermont life to the bustle of the South Hills. They love the ability to simply walk to places from our front door, but they aren't too sure about the traffic.
As for my academic and professional pedigree, I completed my undergraduate degree at Dartmouth, majoring in Anthropology and Native American studies. Post-undergrad, I moved out west, spending two years at the Grand Canyon while contemplating what I wanted to be when I grew up. Because it seemed like a good idea at the time, I moved up to Salt Lake City to experience the 2002 Winter Olympics in person (and to complete a master's degree in education). After a year teaching middle school French and language arts, I moved to northern Vermont to teach freshman composition at what was then Lyndon State College. That morphed into a staff role focused on student success and improving outcomes for underserved populations, and eventually into a long stretch as Director of Advising Resources, supporting Lyndon's faculty advising system. Somewhere along the line, I picked up responsibility for managing data relating to student enrollment and built a rudimentary office of institutional research while helping lead strategic planning for the merger of Lyndon and Johnson State into Northern Vermont University. (Northern Vermont University has since combined with Castleton University and Vermont Tech to become Vermont State University...which translates to about a decade of professional and personal experience with massive institutional change. Fun!)
My intent for the new Office of Student Retention is to first survey and map the excellent work already happening at Carlow. I love the Mercy Mission and how focused on student opportunity and success the faculty, staff, and administration all are here. To support and grow that focus into even better outcomes for our students and the institution as a whole, we need to identify and develop more efficiencies in current processes, uncover inadvertent barriers to persistence, and—in doing so—free up capacity for opportunities for innovation and collaboration. We are in the process of hiring a Student Success & Retention Specialist, who will assist in these efforts and help lead outreach efforts to focus on our near-completers—students who stopped short of graduation—to help fulfill the promise of degree completion.
Please stop in to say hello—I'm located on the third floor of the University Commons. I welcome suggestions and collaborations as we establish this new office, and I look forward to working with and getting to know even more members of this amazing community!
- Kate