EduPreneurial Spirit
Drawing from your own background and experiences, please give practical examples of how the EduPreneurial Spirit can benefit the students, the employees, and the school.
Henry,
Most of the time, the biggest difference between wildly success career colleges and the rest is the attitude of the employees towards the insitution, the students and the subject matter. This is most often attributable to good leadership from the chief administrators.
Jeffrey Schillinger
EduPreneurial Spirit can be dead or alive in a campus or business. How? Well many business are not successful due to the lack of leadership being able to have mangers and employees the the ultimate goal and vision. Leaders who can inspire and motivate the inner greatness of mangers and employees with have an active and positive EduPreneurial Spirit. Negative management and employees can slowly and negatively deteriorate EduPreneurial Spirit for a business and campus. It is very important to keep the campus and business vision alive day to day. Holding meeting with managers weekly and keeping employees accountable for behaviors and decisions made. The leadership has the ability to transform the EduPreneurial Spirit in a business and campus.
The most used I guess would be grade improvement
Well said, Monica. Most higher education institutions have struggled to find ways to measure student learning outcomes. What are some specific assessment strategies used at your institution?
As with any sucessful endeavor, continued assessment and evaluation of what works and keeps us on goal and what doesn't. As a school we must measure the effectiveness of our programs push the ones that work and change what is not working.
This is true for students as well.They must be taught to look at their actions, habits and beliefs and decide which on of these will propell them toward their goal and which detract.
We can not affect what we can not measure.
Here is my delema. the institution i work for looks at the people hiring our students as the "customer" and the student as the product. this makes it difficult to keep the students happy because they feel like Management is not as concerned with their opinioins as they should be. i spend a lot of time trying to explain to the students that the rules are in place to give them the best chance to succeed upon graduating. the students tend to think that because you want them to follow the rules that you dont care where in reality the ones who push them harder care more and are looking at everyones big picture. the less we require from our students the more our students and business will suffer.
People who work in education must realize there are two sides to the industry: the business and educational sides. Without recognizing these two and the differences and contributions each makes, one cannot be very successful working in the industry. Students choose to attend career colleges for various reasons, and from what I've researched from the population I serve, they chose our school because they felt they would do better in a smaller school with smaller student to instructor classroom ratios and lower attendance numbers when compared to the larger colleges and universities in the area. Students like that their admissions rep, their financial aide officer, and the faculty know their name and care about their success. It is important for all personnel to recognize the importance we play in a student's choice and their continued choice to remain in school.
As evidence, I've had students approach me at graduation to tell me of the difference I made in their education. A few mentioned it was the smile I gave them each time I saw them - a simple thing, but it was a business side of acknowledging they were there.
Another example is during our monthly meetings our President discusses our numbers: the number of students who enrolled vs. those that were dropped for various reasons and the amount of money each cost the school. Since all personnel attend these meetings, this keeps us focused on the business side of things and allows us to brain storm on ways to better retain students.
When the departments work together to support each student within our trained area of expertise or escort them to someone who can help them when we cannot, it makes a big difference in regard to the school's overall retention the businesses bottom line and, the difference between a graduate from our school or some other school's graduate.
Charles,
It's also exciting to know that we are influencing not only the student's life, but their family as well.
This is really exciting when you realise that we can be so much more than instructor teaching a course. If we look at the big picture of how we can be part of someone's dream, it's much more then being just an instructor.
James,
This is a great point! The more positive or negative comments that any individual receives will begin to skew their attitudes. We have to be careful about all comments, especially sarcasm, because students may receive a completely different perception that what is meant.
Think of comments given to students as either going into a jar on one end of see-saw or going into another jar on the other side. One jar will only get filled with positive comments and the other negative comments. The jar that gets weighed down the most will absorb into the student the most. So always talk positive to a student and stay away from negative comments even if you have to make it sound positive somehow. You can change their attitude that way.
You are a practicing professional and that is a tremendous asset for the students.
I have a connection with my students when I teach because of my story-telling and past experiences in my business. I bring pictures and portfolios of people that I have met and worked with, to really show my students that they too can accomplish many things in the same field. I believe that it can be inspiring to them and they enjoy seeing the photos of my past work.
In my job every day I know that my interactions with the students will affect their retention. I want my instruction to be relevant. This means the material needs to be alive and helpful to their life! Just like Joe Pace is selling his knowledge on line for $100 plus dollars, we need to be thinking that we can prosper our school by touching lives with knowledge, wisdom and caring. What if the job disappears? Do you have what it takes to continue to educate and figure out a way to be edupreneurial at the same time? Not all people have these qualities...but we all can mentor, model, and monitor.
The EduPreneurial Spirit requires that every staff and faculty member understands that the student is a customer with expectations, needs and desires, and not just a body sitting in a classroom. My personal experience was with an professor in a class that I was struggling in. When I asked him for help, he proceeded to tell me that he didn't have much time to help and how many classes he had to teach. Needless to say, I put that class on the back burner. If the staff portrays the image that they care, the students would be more inclined to care as well.
Serving the student is what it all about wheather you call it customer service or caring.
Great feedback!
Joe
It's intereresting how the perception of the word customer does cause some educators to take offense. I like what you have to say about serving the students. I would think most educators may grasp the word serving and probably feel good about it.
By focusing on developing and maintianing an EduPreneurial Spirit, all parties involved are positively affected and served. Many educators do not consider and/or are offended by the thought that students are "customers" and that they are in the "business" of educating students. Viewing students as customers brings to the forefront the question as to how well we are serving students. From the minute the student walks through the front door (or logs into the online classroom) they should feel that all school employees are there to serve their best interest. It is in effectvely serving our students that we serve ourselves.
Sure our Department of Integrated Services more than enroll an oriented our student has the time to make activities for the integration of our student and improvement their communications.
