To be a national leader in art and humanities research and education for the 21st Century, the College will need to be entrepreneurial in a constrained environment characterized by competitive markets for top faculty and graduate students and reduced public funding for education.
In addition to the Summer Research Incentive and CAL External Funding Incentive programs designed to encourage more faculty and graduate students to apply for and ultimately succeed in winning external funding for our research priorities, the College will also expand and enrich our summer online teaching portfolio. The College has had considerable success in generating revenue over the summer through the Off-Campus Credit Instruction. Between AY13 and AY15, we more that doubled our gross OCCI revenue from $1.3M to $3.7M. Our 5-year goal is to generate at least $10M of OCCI revenue annually by developing a more systematic and integrated strategy among units within the College and across Colleges at MSU that will improve the quality of our online offerings and attract more students to our undergraduate and MA programs.
To accomplish this, the College’s Assistant Dean for Technology and Innovation will lead a Quality Online Teaching and Program Development initiative that ensures our online courses and programs are strategically developed and offered across the College in ways that will allow us to expand our OCCI revenue and improve the quality of our online educational experience. Building upon the existing Graduate Tech TA program, which improves the competitiveness of our graduate students in a tight market by expanding their skills in the area of educational technology, this initiative expands our efforts to improve the quantity and quality of online pedagogy to more faculty in the College. These efforts will be coordinated with existing campus resources (HUB and IT@MSU) to ensure we have the instructional design infrastructure required to create and sustain an excellent online portfolio without duplicating campus resources.
Our third strategy for expanding our revenue base involves further investment in and engagement with Advancement activities. The College has reached its campaign goal of $10M and we are in the process of assessing our capacity to significantly increase our fundraising goal for the final phase of the Empower Extraordinary campaign. In order to accomplish this, we have established three major fundraising goals directly connected to our strategic vision: 1) to raise funds for 5 new endowed faculty positions in the priority areas of culturally engaged digital humanities; engaged scholarship in an interconnected world; integrated design; and media arts; 2) to generate resources for 10 new endowed graduate fellowships across the College; and 3) to raise $10M to endow the Citizens Scholars program.