Strategic Guidance 2023-25

Under the umbrella of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, including Worldwide Campus strategic plans, the College of Arts & Sciences pursues the following goals and strategies within its Vision and Mission Statement, aiming to maintain strengths, reduce weaknesses, seize opportunities and confront challenges as previously identified in the college’s review and planning process.

Goal 1: Enhance our students' experience through holistically delivered rigorous education

Strategies:

• Pursue to deliver a continuously improved, nationally leading general education program that provides the core competencies for subsequent student success in disciplinary education.
• Provide a strong ethics and values foundation, including diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).
• Increase internal and external undergraduate research opportunities through capstone courses, the research heading in COMPASS (Center of Mentorship Programs and Student Success), the research pillar in VECTOR (Virtual Environment for Communication: Teaching, Outreach and Research), the research quadrant in EQUATES (Everything Quantitative for Teachers and Students) and research internships/partnerships with industry and government entities.
• Prepare students for successful graduate studies and career success through state-of-the-art foundations, applied studies, critical thinking and competency for defensible analysis.
• Offer out-of-class student enrichment opportunities in the form of professional society and honor society chapters, speaker series and international experience programs.
• Institutionalize existing strategic initiatives into a coordinated and quality-managed set of student success components.
• Offer research-based culminating experiences in flexible formats (such as capstones, internships, independent study courses, etc.)
• Explore the offering of executive residential courses in select degree programs, in addition to certain general education courses, on select Embry-Riddle sites across the U.S.

Goal 2: Systematically advance our programs, certificates and curriculum

Strategies:

• Grow the student base for our undergraduate and graduate degree programs:
• Increase enrollments by systematically working in a coordinated effort to matriculate new students and reengage with inactive students through a comprehensive communication approach, working together with enrollment management and advising.
• Continue our strategic focus on minors to:
• Develop strategic minors that align with our evolving research agenda and faculty expertise clusters.
• Take the next step in identifying select strategic minors for expanding into majors, where the minors would feed into the major.
• Develop professional education programs to serve additional constituencies, offer refreshers for graduates (state-of-the-art update webinars or executive short courses) and create an additional conduit into our degree programs.
• Ensure the relevancy of academic programs and courses to enterprise (industry, government, military, private sector and international organizations) demand, including through pursuing program accreditation when applicable.
• Maintain the quality and integrity of our degree programs with innovative, pedagogically sound, preventative and mitigating measures.

Goal 3: Increase the scholastic and social presence of our college through research, creative works, professional leadership and innovation

Strategies:

• Continue to have an agile social media presence with the goal of also connecting to more of our prospects, current students and alumni.
• Achieve and demonstrate sectoral thought leadership through virtual and in-person speaker series, seminars, workshops and symposia.
• Pursue joint, multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary research through intra- and interdepartmental collaboration within the college, across the Worldwide Campus, across the University’s three colleges of Arts & Sciences, with other universities, with professional organizations, as well as through structured engagement with local/regional communities and federal agencies.
• Consolidate the college’s footprint as a research provider and underpin our strategic dissemination goal through the curation of a quality student paper and faculty open-access publication repository on Scholarly Commons (Embry-Riddle Hunt Library).
• Develop student and alumni affinity through outreach and engagement activities.
• Increase the visibility of college research and scholastic accomplishments through traditional and non-traditional channels.

Goal 4: Champion our faculty and strengthen our college through engagement, coordination and partnership

Strategies:

• Promote a strong community of excellence of highly engaged full-time and part-time (adjunct) faculty.
• Focus on and support the enhancement of teaching quality and teaching to the state of the art in the respective field(s), which also sets our undergraduate programs apart from community colleges.
• Establish and resource targeted focus areas or faculty research groups in:
• Online STEM Education
• Data Science
• Humanistic STEM
• Security and resilience (see Goal 5), including a focus on air transportation security
• Create a comprehensive approach to faculty mentoring and development.
• Create a comprehensive approach to faculty appreciation and recognition.
• Work with various University units to create a greater global awareness of our degree programs and innovative scholastic and professional contributions.
• Review and effectuate business processes within the college and continue to build a solid internal communication and information-sharing structure.
• Improve the college’s research potential and footprint; in particular, through programmatic engagement with stakeholders and professional communities.

Goal 5: Implement an interdisciplinary, interdepartmental virtual collaboratory for security and resilience education, research and engagement

Strategies:

• Achieve research excellence as evidenced by peer-reviewed scholarly publications, externally funded research grants, and industry and academic research collaborations.
• Achieve academic excellence as evidenced by the development of strategic interdisciplinary courses that provide highly desirable career competencies as well as undergraduate and graduate student research experiences.
• Build the core for an interdisciplinary cross-departmental Graduate Academy for Advanced Security and Resilience Studies.
• Become an educational partner for local, state and federal agencies in the homeland security enterprise.
• Establish a Virtual International & National Guest Scholars (VINGS) Program.
• Become a consortium partner in a U.S. Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence by participating in relevant grant requests for proposals.
• Establish a conference, workshop and webinar series.