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Back to About the Project
This report summarizes work on the Urban Universities Portfolio Project (UUPP) from the project’s inception in Spring 1998 through June 1999. Most of the report focuses on progress to date toward key project deliverables and the activities and approaches that have enabled that progress; it concludes with a discussion of future plans and a summary of lessons learned. We address both campus-level and project-wide activities and accomplishments in the report. Additional details on campus and project-wide work can be found in the appendices. Background and Overall StatusOnce funding for the UUPP was approved in March 1998, the proposers and campuses made final preparations for getting the project underway. A project director was appointed, to be based at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Two boards were constituted: the National Advisory Board (NAB), composed of representatives of major stakeholders of urban public universities, and the Institutional Review Board (IRB), composed of stakeholders, assessment experts and representatives of other types of universities. A project leadership team, including the three original proposers, the new project director, and the director of the institutional research component of the project, was assembled. Please see Appendix A for lists of the members of these groups. The participating universities include
At each of the universities, the provost appointed the campus project director and institutional research staff who would be responsible for guiding development of the individual campus’s institutional portfolio. The campus director and institutional research representative, along with the provost, form the core project team on each of the six campuses. Lists of UUPP provosts, campus directors, and institutional research staff are also included in Appendix A. The UUPP kicked off with an all-project meeting, including campus participants, NAB and IRB members, and the project leadership team, held at IUPUI on August 6-8, 1998. At this meeting, participants were introduced to the project and to one another, and discussed the national issues that the project would address. NAB members and a panel of external stakeholders commented on the issues and provided additional perspectives. Campus teams began planning the work of the upcoming year. The decision was also made to change the name of the project from “Public Communication Through Institutional Portfolios: Quality Assurance at Urban Public Comprehensive Universities” to “The Urban Universities Portfolio Project: Assuring Quality for Multiple Publics.” Over the course of this first year, significant progress has taken place at both the campus and project-wide levels. Several campuses have already made substantial strides in developing their electronic institutional portfolios, including creating overall organizing frameworks for the portfolios and fleshing out individual portfolio sections. Other campuses devoted this first year to crucial preparations for portfolio development, such as inventorying campus assessment practices and processes, and are now poised to begin development of the portfolios themselves. The following section provides a more detailed account of campus work; please refer also to the individual campus progress reports and the summary grid in Appendix H. At the project-wide level, participants spent much of the year working toward consensus on components that will appear in all six institutional portfolios. These components include several fundamental learning outcomes that all six campuses will document in their portfolios, and the description of “urban public university” that will inform the six portfolios. Working collaboratively on these common areas will allow us to define collectively what constitutes institutional effectiveness in the urban public setting, and, in turn, to communicate our conclusions to internal and external stakeholders more effectively than we can do as individual institutions. The common learning outcomes and the description of “urban public university” that we are considering are discussed in detail in the section of this report on Project-Wide Activities and Progress. In addition, we have opened conversations with several of the regional accrediting associations with the aim of enhancing their understanding of the missions of urban public universities and of focusing accreditation on effectiveness in those areas most crucial to those missions, especially educational effectiveness. We have initiated discussion with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in hopes of contributing to the new institutional classification system that Carnegie is currently developing. We have begun contacts with media, such as U.S. News and World Report, that influence popular opinions of higher education. We have made a good start on disseminating the work of the project to a broader set of colleagues within higher education, and are collaborating with several related Pew initiatives. All of these efforts are described in the sections that follow. Campus Activities and ProgressInitial Campus WorkNo close prototype exists for the reflective, electronic institutional portfolios that this project aims to create. Models for effective campus processes for developing institutional portfolios are similarly scarce. Each UUPP institution has thus had to come to terms this year with how to organize campus work on the project and how to create an initial framework for the portfolio. As might be expected, given the complexity of the project and the diversity of the six UUPP institutions, the six campuses adopted a wide range of strategies for moving forward. As the initial year of the project comes to an end, we also find considerable variation in how far the campuses have come in developing the portfolios themselves. Three project campuses, CSUS, IUPUI and PSU, are well along in developing organizing frameworks for their portfolios, specifying the institutional goals and objectives the portfolios will address, and beginning to flesh out individual portfolio sections. The CSUS and IUPUI portfolios use their universities’ strategic planning priorities as their primary organizing framework. While PSU does not have a formal strategic planning process, its UUPP Faculty Advisory Committee has generated a set of broad section headings for the institutional portfolio that resembles a list of strategic priorities. In the cases of PSU and IUPUI, these initial portfolios are on-line, linked to the main UUPP web site at www.imir.iupui.edu/portfolio/; the CSUS portfolio is under revision and is not currently on-line. In addition to creating overall frameworks for their portfolios, CSUS and IUPUI have developed initial outlines for documenting communication and IUPUI has developed one for documenting critical thinking. Communication and critical thinking are two likely candidates for the learning outcomes that all six institutions will select as focuses. PSU has begun work on documenting its Community Partnerships Program, a best teaching/learning practice that highlights the university’s commitments to student learning and to the urban community. Other project universities decided that they had some considerable work to do to prepare for beginning work on their portfolios. GSU, UIC and UMB all spent much of the year developing student writing assessment initiatives that their portfolios will feature. UMB, finding that it lacked comprehensive information on already-existing assessment practices and structures, completed an institution-wide inventory of these practices and structures, and began work on strengthening assessment at the department and college levels. GSU established a newly unified institutional research office, bringing together activities and staff previously scattered among a number of university offices. Through that office, GSU began developing new processes for documenting assessment results and tracking student data. UIC continued large-scale efforts to reconceptualize general education and to develop an assessment program, and generated a monitoring report for the North Central Association on assessment of student academic outcomes. All three institutions expect to begin detailed work on the portfolios themselves in the fall. Factors Influencing Campus ProgressWhat factors influenced campus progress on the UUPP this year? We have no easy answers to this question. Based on the campuses’ own reporting, however, and on the project director’s and IRB members’ campus visits and observations, we can offer some initial ideas. First, it seems significant that the three institutions that have begun their portfolios had some of the important foundations for the UUPP already in place at the time the project began. CSUS, for example, has a well-developed, ongoing strategic planning process, overseen by a faculty committee, wherein progress toward strategic goals is assessed and reported annually, using performance indicators agreed on by the committee. The planning priorities, performance indicators, and regular assessment and reporting provided CSUS with a framework that was fairly readily translatable into a template for the university’s institutional portfolio. Along similar lines, IUPUI’s Office of Planning and Institutional Improvement publishes an annual performance report that summarizes progress in key strategic areas—the same areas that make up the major categories of documentation in IUPUI’s institutional portfolio. The existence of well-developed, ongoing systems and structures for planning and assessment appears to have helped CSUS and IUPUI to make relatively rapid progress on their portfolios this year. In addition, the three institutions that have begun portfolios have strong institutional research offices that have been in place for some time and that have broadly defined, integral roles in campus-wide planning and assessment activities. Overall, the integrated “information cultures” and organizational structures at these three campuses meant that they had some starting points for conceptualizing their institutional portfolios, as well as substantial information resources to draw on as sections of the portfolios were developed. Indeed, this past year’s activities at the other three project campuses, particularly their work on developing assessment and institutional research programs, were, in part, efforts to implement or enhance such information structures and cultures under the aegis of the UUPP. Those campuses that have already begun portfolios have also established broadly inclusive campus processes and active working groups for portfolio development, while the campuses that have not yet begun portfolios chose not to establish a working group beyond the core team, or established a relatively less active group. PSU and IUPUI chose similar structures for the project: an Executive Planning Committee at PSU and a Core Committee at IUPUI, both made up of the provost, campus director, the institutional researcher and several other key administrators, make major strategic decisions and oversee the entire campus process. Development of the institutional portfolio itself is charged to a ten-member Faculty Advisory Committee at PSU and a 22-member faculty/administration Implementation Committee at IUPUI. These two committees both meet monthly and represent an array of perspectives, expertise and constituencies across their campuses. PSU’s initial portfolio web site exemplifies the spirit of inclusiveness that has characterized the evolution of the project there. The site includes a wealth of information on the work of the Faculty Advisory Committee and the development of the portfolio itself, and invites comments from site visitors. One of the principles for the project established by the committee is that “the Portfolio will provide a forum for discussion, comments, and feedback, and for conversations about assessment” (quoted from PSU’s 1998-99 UUPP progress report). The committee has also convened several focus groups to comment on the design of the portfolio, and to discuss ways of disseminating the project and ensuring buy-in from internal and external stakeholders. CSUS’s campus process is similarly collaborative and inclusive. The primary planning group for the portfolio includes four key administrators and four faculty members. The campus director works extensively with faculty governance groups, deans, and relevant committees, such as the Council for University Planning, which develops and maintains the CSUS strategic plan. The director has also spearheaded a survey of CSUS faculty and community stakeholders that is being used to select a set of core learning outcomes for the baccalaureate degree. According to the director, the inclusiveness of the campus process “provided the project with legitimacy on a campus which has a strong sense of shared faculty governance.” He reports that, at the end of this first year, “all of the administrators, college Deans, members of the Executive Committee of the Faculty Senate, the Senate Chair, most full-time faculty… members of [the Council on University Planning] and some community stakeholders have heard about the UUPP project or have directly participated in it or supported it" (quoted from CSUS’s 1998-99 UUPP progress report). It seems not coincidental that the campuses that have active, broadly representative UUPP working groups also report the greatest benefits from the project. PSU’s campus director notes that the UUPP Faculty Advisory Committee has come to be seen as a campus “model for faculty engagement in university-wide initiatives,” and that the project is advancing the goal of bringing together a number of activities with common themes and elements—e.g., a newly formed University Assessment Council, two Pew-funded projects on learning communities and writing assessment, and redesign of the university’s web site (see PSU’s 1998-99 UUPP progress report). Similarly, IUPUI’s campus director notes that a major benefit of the project is “to help build identity and community within IUPUI by articulating the common underpinnings of our complex and diverse organization and programmatic efforts” (quoted from IUPUI’s 1998-99 UUPP progress report). The campus directors at CSUS, IUPUI and PSU all cite the active, collaborative nature of their campus processes and the strong campus-wide buy-in these processes have generated as crucial to these results. The benefits realized by the campuses to date are largely internal ones. Most UUPP campuses have not yet included external stakeholders in their planning or just began to include them late in the academic year. Involvement of external stakeholders in the project is summarized in the section below on that topic. Involvement of Campus LeadershipTo encourage involvement of top campus leaders, the UUPP convened a videoconference in December of chancellors and presidents of project institutions. The purpose of the conference was to ensure that campus CEO’s were aware of and supportive of the project, and to discuss ways in which they might help to disseminate the project’s work. David Morse, Public Affairs Director for The Pew Charitable Trusts, was on hand to help guide this discussion, offer Pew’s assistance, and make suggestions. We plan further meetings involving UUPP campus CEO’s; these plans are detailed in the sections that follow. Strong support from the provost is also essential for a large initiative like this one to develop successfully on a campus and have an impact on internal and external stakeholders. As noted above, the UUPP campus provosts are key members of the core campus teams. They attended all national meetings of the project this year, except for the campus directors’ working meetings. One unexpected development this past year has been the turnover of three provosts since the project was initially organized. UIC appointed a new provost prior to the inception of the project, and both UMB and PSU have new provosts beginning this summer. The two outgoing provosts have committed themselves to ensuring that their successors are familiar with and supportive of the project; both of this summer’s new provosts plan to attend the August all-project meeting. UIC’s provost joined the project at its outset and has been actively involved throughout the year. The year has also seen changes to campus staff involved with the project. UMB’s original institutional researcher assigned to the UUPP left the institution and has been replaced by another UMB institutional research staff member; that institution also appointed a new director of institutional research in the middle of the year. The transition has been smooth. The project director at CSUS is retiring and will be replaced by a new campus director; the campus and the outgoing and incoming directors are working to ensure that this change will not interrupt project work, and we anticipate a smooth transition here as well. Involvement of External StakeholdersInvolvement of external stakeholders at the level of individual project campuses has not yet been extensive, with one major exception. As part of an initiative to develop a set of fundamental learning outcomes for undergraduates, CSUS conducted a survey this year of all full-time faculty and of 50 community stakeholders who serve on various community advisory boards for the university. Input from the community stakeholders will help ensure that the outcomes selected are responsive to community educational needs. IUPUI and PSU have had more limited involvement of external stakeholders this year. IUPUI included several community leaders in an initial exploratory meeting in the fall, and subsequently appointed an officer of the Indiana Commission on Higher Education to the portfolio Implementation Committee. This committee will be reconstituted next year to include additional community stakeholders, while representatives of other external agencies will be included in various focus groups and informational meetings. PSU has begun convening focus groups to comment on the portfolio design and other issues. The first of these groups, which met in May, included members of possible audiences for the portfolio, such as high school counselors, accrediting board members, and state and local officials. PSU plans to continue involving “critical friends” from outside the university as its work progresses over the next two years. GSU, UIC and UMB have also indicated plans to begin working with external stakeholders over the next year. These three institutions have identified their respective regional accrediting associations as primary audiences for their portfolios. Campus Site VisitsAt the outset of the UUPP, the twelve members of the IRB were each assigned to work especially closely with one project campus; each of the six campuses thus has two designated IRB members, who are serving as consultants on portfolio development, and who will conduct pre-audit and audit visits to the campuses in the second and third years of the project, respectively. This year’s IRB site visits were introductory, aimed primarily at familiarizing IRB members with their assigned campuses and providing an opportunity for campus project leaders to receive some expert feedback on their work during this initial phase of the project. Four UUPP campuses hosted IRB visits this past spring and the other two have visits scheduled for the summer. Feedback on the value of these visits from both the campuses and the IRB members who have participated thus far has been very positive. IRB reports from the four visits conducted to date are included here in Appendix B. The UUPP Director participated in the IUPUI IRB visit and also visited all five of the other campuses. These visits were invaluable for learning about the campuses’ urban contexts, priorities, institutional cultures, accountability needs and concerns, and levels of development of planning, assessment and institutional research—as well as for gaining some insight into how each institution is proceeding with development of its portfolio. Much of the material in this report is drawn from these visits. Project-Wide Activities and ProgressWhile each UUPP university has its own individual reasons for participating in the project, the UUPP also has a collective agenda: to enhance understanding of urban public universities among our major stakeholder groups; to develop indicators and measures of effectiveness appropriate to our institutional type; to create templates for documenting learning outcomes; and to produce model electronic institutional portfolios that document and assess our work in the context of our urban missions, and that are easily accessible and user-friendly. To achieve these aims, we first had to reach some common understandings among ourselves. Much of our collective work this year has thus focused on defining what we have in common as urban public universities, on identifying several learning outcomes that all participating institutions will address in their portfolios, and on discussing how the two themes of “urban-ness” and of student learning might shape and be represented in our institutional portfolios. These issues were major agenda items at four UUPP meetings held over the course of the 1998-99 academic year. Two of these meetings took place in conjunction with Urban 13 meetings at UIC and City College of New York; these meetings included the core campus project teams, the leadership team, and assorted members of the two project boards (for whom these meetings were “optional”). Two additional meetings, convened in conjunction with AAHE’s annual conferences on faculty roles and rewards and on assessment, included the six campus project directors and several IRB members. Agendas and other materials from the past year’s meetings are included in Appendix C. Characteristics of Urban Public UniversitiesA shared “message” about the distinctive characteristics and missions of our institutions is essential to the UUPP’s ability to demonstrate the need for more meaningful indicators and measures of effectiveness for urban public universities and, in turn, to improve stakeholder understanding of our accomplishments, challenges and work. We devoted substantial meeting time this year to discussing those common characteristics that shape our identities as urban public universities; the characteristics we agree on will be featured in all six institutional portfolios. To date, we have tentatively identified four characteristics of our institutions that together define us as urban public universities. 1. Student profile 2.
Program mix 3. Use of the city as a focus for teaching, research and service 4. Commitment to access Please see the draft on “Characteristics of Urban Public Universities” in Appendix D for additional details. We will continue refining this working definition of “urban public university” over the next year as the individual portfolios develop and as our project-wide discussions continue. Student Learning OutcomesOur work on learning outcomes this year focused on identifying outcomes for the baccalaureate shared in common by the six UUPP universities and on discussing how learning outcomes might be represented in the portfolios. We intend that this work will result in models for documenting learning outcomes that can be used by other institutions, and in a clearer understanding of how our urban settings and missions shape and enrich student learning at our universities. UUPP campus project directors have also exchanged information on their universities’ assessment practices, which vary widely. All of the UUPP campuses are working to enhance assessment, however, and joined the project, in part, to advance this goal. At the Fall ’98 UUPP meeting at UIC, IRB member Peter Ewell suggested four questions or criteria to guide our selection of learning goals to address in common:
With these questions in mind, the group identified four possible learning outcomes for common documentation:
Over the course of the year, written communication has emerged as an outcome that all six UUPP universities are interested in and as a focus for new assessment initiatives at several of them. Consequently, the most recent project directors’ meeting, held in conjunction with the AAHE Assessment Conference in June, included an in-depth workshop, led by IRB member Barbara Walvoord, on “Writing Assessment and Its Use in UUPP Portfolios.” The group examined several approaches to writing assessment, ways that the evidence resulting from these assessments might be reflected in the portfolios, and the question of “what’s urban?” about writing and its assessment at our universities. We found this a productive exercise and plan similar discussions around additional common learning outcomes as they emerge. We are also beginning to discuss assessment of the impact of service learning on students. Service learning, by many names and in varying formats, is widely used at our institutions and can be readily linked to the “urban-ness” and civic engagement themes of our project as well as to the common learning outcomes we are considering. Our all-project meeting at PSU this August will include a workshop on assessment of service learning led by Sherril Gelmon, Associate Professor of Public Health at PSU, and Robert Bringle, Professor of Psychology and Director of the Office of Public Service and Leadership at IUPUI. Institutional Research CollaborationAs the UUPP institutions work individually and collectively to define the characteristics and missions of urban public universities, the institutional research representatives from the UUPP campuses have been part of a parallel effort to develop corresponding indicators and measures. This initiative, the Urban University Statistical Portrait Project (UUSPP), has been developing concurrently with the UUPP project, but within a larger group of collaborating institutions. The project, which responds to the insufficiency of current measures for our group of institutions (and, arguably, all universities), aims to capture the full range of functions carried out by urban public universities. Following initial discussions at the 1998 conference of the Coalition for Urban and Metropolitan Universities, UUSPP participants have continued to meet this year in conjunction with the twice-yearly Urban 13 and UUPP meetings. The UUPP institutional research representatives are thus working closely with colleagues from ten other urban public universities on the following six initiatives: 1. Key Indicators: Develop and exchange a core set of measures to reflect the contributions of urban universities to their communities. 2. Exchange Data: Form data exchange consortia among subgroups of urban and metropolitan universities to serve the immediate information needs of participating institutions. Analyze requests to formulate potential key indicators. 3. Web Data: Assemble data collected by governmental and other agencies (e.g., IPEDS, Common Data Set, Faculty Salaries by Discipline and Rank, Delaware Instructional Productivity Survey, and others) into a commonly accessible web-based database. 4. Common Surveys: Develop common surveys or survey items to collect data for key indicators in standard form and format. 5. Indicator Research: Commission research efforts to develop measures for areas of interest that are currently not well defined. 6. Dissemination: Support efforts to "tell the story" of urban universities to local, regional, and national publics, using the identified key indicators and other mechanisms. Additional information about the
UUSPP can be found by visiting the project web site at Involvement of External StakeholdersThe UUPP is structured to “build in” critique by and perspectives of major external stakeholder groups at the project-wide level through the involvement of the NAB. Members of the NAB include representatives of regional accrediting agencies, SHEEOs, business, and national higher education policy groups. While some NAB members have been closely involved with the project this year, we have not involved some others to the extent we hoped; we will work to remedy this over the next year. IRB members, though mostly from within higher education, also have extensive experience in working with external stakeholder groups, and advise the project and their assigned campuses about the perspectives of these groups. The IRB has played an even larger role in the project than originally anticipated. We have also begun dialogues with several of the stakeholder groups we most hope to influence. The NAB for the UUPP includes the executive directors of the higher education commissions of two regional accrediting organizations, the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools and the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, and they have participated actively in our project meetings and discussions. We have worked especially closely with Ralph Wolff of the Western Association, who spoke at our October meeting about the association’s Pew-funded effort to develop alternative forms of documentation for institutional accreditation. We hope to collaborate with this initiative as our two projects progress. A panel discussion with representatives of the Middle States and Western Associations, along with the North Central Association of Schools and Colleges, is on the agenda for our August all-project meeting at PSU. Initial discussions with the three other regional accrediting agencies are planned for the upcoming year. An important goal of the UUPP is to participate in the development of the new Carnegie classification system for higher education institutions. The Portland meeting in August will feature a discussion with Alex McCormick of Carnegie, who is spearheading the work on the new system, and we plan to continue these discussions as Carnegie’s work progresses. In addition, we have begun discussions with the Council for the Advancement and Support of Higher Education (CASE) about sponsoring a series of dinner discussions among CEO’s of urban public universities and media representatives. We hope to begin this series in the coming year. We have also invited a representative of U.S. News and World Report to our August meeting. And we have begun planning a Fall 2000 meeting at Maryland’s Wye River Conference Centers that will bring together urban public university CEO’s with opinion leaders in several of our major stakeholder groups. Role of the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE)AAHE is a cosponsor and crucial participant in the UUPP. AAHE’s president, Peg Miller, and director of Teaching Initiatives, Barbara Cambridge, play important leadership roles through their participation on the UUPP leadership team, and as project liaisons with the NAB and IRB, respectively. A part-time project staff member is also based at AAHE’s Washington, D.C. office. Our collaboration with AAHE has provided the project with highly visible, national venues for disseminating the project through its conferences and publications, as well as with many informal opportunities to discuss the work of the project with opinion leaders inside and outside higher education. For example, Peg Miller recently featured the project in a keynote speech at the annual meeting of the Council on Higher Education Accreditation. In short, the leadership and access provided by AAHE have already enhanced the national impact of the project and will continue to do so over the next two years. Project DisseminationProject participants gave five major presentations on the UUPP this past year, three at AAHE conferences, one at the national forum of the Association for Institutional Research, and one at the Western Association of Schools and Colleges. The AAHE Bulletin published monthly updates on the project. Please see Appendix E for a detailed list of presentations and participants, and Appendix F for copies of the monthly updates. In addition to these formal presentations, informal discussions of the project have taken place at Urban 13 meetings, with a formal report in the works for the Fall 1999 meeting at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The project web site, available at http://www.imir.iupui.edu/portfolio/, has also developed into a major dissemination vehicle, with 3,067 visits as of mid-July. Although we did not formally track telephone, mail and e-mail inquiries this year, national and campus project staff have all reported contacts resulting from visits to the web site. In several cases, these contacts made us aware of relevant work under way by other higher education institutions and groups. We will begin systematically tracking inquiries in the next year. Please see Appendix G for a detailed report on web site activity. Collaboration with Other Pew-Funded InitiativesThe opportunity to collaborate with other Pew-funded efforts has been especially valuable to the project during this past year. As noted above, we have begun ongoing discussions with participants in the Western Association’s initiative and with Carnegie. The UUPP project director participated in the Pew Academic Audit Seminar, organized by David Dill at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, this past spring; materials from that meeting are being distributed to UUPP participants in preparation for the IRB pre-audit and audit visits in 2000 and 2001. In addition, five of the six UUPP institutions are participating as a group in the Fall ’99 pilot of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). Our participation in this project is an opportunity for us to gather comparable information about student learning experiences and the learning environment at our institutions. The sixth UUPP campus, CSUS, already uses many items similar to those in the NSSE in its ongoing student surveys; additional items from the NSSE will be incorporated into CSUS’s 1999-2000 surveys so that all six UUPP universities will have a body of data that can be aggregated and compared. Future PlansCampus PlansPlease see the individual campus progress reports for details on their plans for the coming year. Generally, those campuses that have already begun portfolios will continue to develop, flesh out and elaborate on the start they made during the past year. In some cases, portfolio planning and work has also stimulated other, related campus initiatives that will be pursued next year. For example, PSU reports that the UUPP has catalyzed an emergent strategic planning process that will be further developed as the project continues. Other campuses are just beginning the work of designing and constructing their portfolios and will continue this over the next year. UIC’s portfolio will feature the campus’s current work on general education and assessment, and its Great Cities initiatives. GSU will focus on documenting four current initiatives: a proposed new “urban learning” outcome; assessment of student writing; development of a web-based system to help colleges and departments meet student demand for particular courses; and analysis of freshman and senior surveys aimed at assessing the quality of the learning environment. To support these efforts, those campuses that have not yet formed a UUPP working group have indicated plans to do so for the 1999-2000 year. The expanded teams being constituted for the August all-project meeting at PSU should help these groups get off to a strong start. Several UUPP campuses also note that they are beginning to address the issue of how the portfolios will be maintained once the formal project concludes. In building the portfolios, our aim is not just to accomplish a discrete task, but to develop an ongoing system for reporting and reflecting on important aspects of our universities’ work. Finally, most of the project campuses plan to expand involvement of external stakeholders over the next year. Project-Wide PlansPlans for next year’s project-wide work include:
Lessons LearnedMany of our “lessons learned” are incorporated into the previous sections of this report and into the individual campus progress reports. Here are a few additional comments about what we might do differently if we could start again from the beginning:
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