Lyndi Duff (Salt Lake Community College) on Streamlining Curriculum for Lifelong Learning and Student Success

On today’s episode of the Illumination by Modern Campus podcast, podcast host Shauna Cox was joined by Lyndi Duff to discuss how to optimize curriculum processes to enhance institutional efficiency, meet diverse learner needs and support lifelong learning opportunities.

Transcript

Voiceover: Welcome to Illumination by Modern Campus, the leading podcast focused on transformation and change in the higher education space. On today’s episode, we speak with Lyndi Duff, who is Director of Curriculum at Salt Lake Community College. Lyndi and podcast host Shauna Cox discuss how to optimize curriculum processes to enhance institutional efficiency, meet diverse learner needs and support lifelong learning opportunities.

Shauna Cox (00:03):Lyndi, welcome to the Illumination podcast. I'm so glad you could join me today. 

Lyndi Duff (00:06):Thanks. I'm excited to be here. 

Shauna Cox (00:08):Absolutely. So we are here to chat about streamline curriculum processes and supporting student pathways two very critical elements in higher education. So I'm going to kick off our conversation and ask how do streamline curriculum processes enhance an institution's abilities to support diverse student pathways and respond to those ever-changing market demands? 

Lyndi Duff (00:32):Yeah, thanks for the question. So we have in curriculum, there's lots of different things that are pulling us. We have different priorities and things, but I think consistently that those are things that are important to everybody to have processes that aren't cumbersome, that can be a little more fluid, but respond to those things that will help students and be a little timely in the curriculum we're trying to offer. And so a couple of ways that we've found here at Salt Lake Community College to do that is we have an institutional program review process where we're looking at our programs and our curriculum and then looking to see do they continue to be relevant? Do they continue to support student outcomes that we expect them to? And creating a process like the curriculum approval process that is very transparent. So making sure people know the deadlines, that the forms are clean and easily understood, and then constantly revising those, right? Taking in feedback and making sure that we look at our processes and make sure that they are still working and functioning well and feedback is a big part of that. 

Shauna Cox (01:52):Absolutely. And when it comes to curriculum processes alone is no small task, but you're throwing in curriculum to, it also can't be a small task. So what are some of the main challenges that institutions face when managing curriculum updates, especially constantly having to do them, and how can leaders start to overcome some of those obstacles? 

Lyndi Duff (02:14):So some of the things that historically that I've seen that have really helped improve what those issues might be, I've seen some things like we don't have, if someone doesn't have their committee dates posted and have a logical pathway of what it would maybe look like if they were to submit a change, how long can I expect that to take? So being very transparent and saying, if you submit a program change, it's a new program, it's going to take the longest of any of the programs. Here's the committee dates and here's when we'd recommend you kind get your stuff in. Have also done some things like we have a curriculum deadline and it's important to really enforce those so that you have your catalog published on time, so can get that information on what are the program requirements for the year that I'm starting and so that I can start registering. 

Lyndi Duff (03:08):And so it's important that we adhere to those deadlines, but how do we get that information out to schools? How do we help support them in meeting those deadlines? So it's being timely in our communication, but also being very clear as to what those expectations are. And I think that if we can be clear that it really helps them plan their curriculum cycles to help match ours. And so I think that that really helps because the committee dates can be really difficult. And then on top of that, you have faculty or administrators who maybe go on leave and how do you help support, they received an approval that they needed to make and how do we fix that? We have to put some alternative person in place or force it forward. So there's really some great tools and things that you can use, especially in a software like we're using to be able to revise that as you're going because things happen and people are gone sometimes and you have to be able to adapt. And I think that that helps, having the right tools in place to do that. 

Shauna Cox (04:22):There's a lot of people and stakeholders behind the scenes needing different things and having various needs, which I think also is reflected in the front end when it comes to the learners. If the last few years has shown us anything, it's that there are a wide variety of learners out there with very diverse needs in looking at the curriculum, how can curriculum management be optimized to ensure accessibility, relevance, and inclusivity for all learners at the institution? 

Lyndi Duff (04:53):And I think that that's something that everybody's looking at right now because we're trying to meet all the requirements, especially for the new a accommodations that we need to support. And I think the first part for us is making sure that we have tools in place and working with companies who are really focused on that so that the tools that we're providing and our staff and our faculty and administrators are using have a lot of those built-in features. And then I think about the training materials that we produce internally. We want them to be able to use the software really well. So we might create a PDF, but PDFs are historically really difficult to make accessible. And so working with groups on our campus who have that knowledge and that skill, and then also making videos and making sure those are captioned. And I think those are really important things to do because we have, like you mentioned, lots of different needs and it's just very important for us to have those in consideration. So the students get the end product our, and we work with a company who's going to make sure that that's accessible. But then when we have to create PDFs and when we have to have training materials and our own websites, it's just going to continue to be more important. But not just because we're told that we need to do it, but because it's a good way of doing something and making sure that we're being thoughtful and considerate of all types of learners. 

Shauna Cox (06:23):Absolutely. And I think that dovetails really nicely into the next question because especially with something like a catalog, you definitely in a digital age want to be digital. You can't stick to paper. So what role does technology play in simplifying curriculum creation approval and the deployment? 

Lyndi Duff (06:43):

So I've been in a couple places where they started with, and everybody did a paper process, and that paper process is not sustainable. And we were really very fortunate to have moved to curriculum management at a time before covid, right? So we were electronic already. And so we were very fortunate in that not everybody was as lucky, but we continued to see the value of it at that time, right? Because you can move into an electronic space, you can still have committee meetings through Zoom, you can still vote and approve things and it doesn't prevent you from moving forward with a process. And so it's important to have the tools in place to do so. 

One of the things that I think is the most important about the work that I'm doing in curriculum management is I am here to support faculty and administration in the development. I'm not developing the curriculum, but the tools that I'm providing help with the creation and the deployment and the publishing of all that information. And we might've had at one time the paper process. So we might have had a book that we printed, and so there's printing services involved, and then you might have it support because you have to publish a website and put information on it. And now we see a process that is simplified in the way that we're consolidating the number of places that we have to make changes. We're displaying accurate information and things that we can edit in real time or hold firm on the things that we need to because maybe veteran affairs has a copy of our catalog and those things can't change at that point once those have been submitted and we're held to a kind of contract with that catalog as to what we're going to offer students. 

Lyndi Duff (09:13):And so having that kind of simplified process in place helps us display the right information. But then it also helps us go through a process where if our faculty are making changes and we're hearing feedback like the form, this question doesn't make sense or we need help in simplifying, there's too many steps in our process and it might inform some of our curriculum or workflows and things that we can, sometimes there's policies in place that we can't edit or change very quickly because it is higher education and we are required to inform, our processes are informed by policies, and so we're still trying to adhere to those. But the things that we can improve, I can send an email notification automatically. We don't have to manually walk a piece of paper, we don't have to wait for some of those person who was gone and now we have, what are we going to do now that they're not here? So it really helps in some of that kind of simplification. And so I think that those are some of the ways that you could improve that. 

Shauna Cox (10:23):And I want to talk about, or I want to expand on this a little bit more and ask how does this directly impact institutional efficiency? I know you alluded to some things there and then also from the student side, overall student success. 

Lyndi Duff (10:38):So we've seen in a couple of things where let's say someone wasn't aware of our deadline, we talked about that a little bit. And so they missed a deadline. Well now, or they are at a later committee date, their curriculum is not going to be improved in time for them to actively be doing recruiting and getting their admissions. So it impacts the programs. They can't offer the curriculum that they expect in, but it also impacts the student because maybe there's really valuable changes that they're trying to move forward, either whether it's a new degree or certificate or they're making revisions to the learning outcomes of a course. All of those things end up impacting the student's experience and the value of their education. So it's important for us to be able to adapt and make sure that we have really good, we're good at again listening because we're taking back that feedback and saying, okay, there's something in the process that's not working. 

Lyndi Duff (11:36):And then being able to make those changes. And ultimately that means curriculum's approved in a timely manner, but it's also good and it's meeting all the policies and there's no errors in the data. And then making sure that students are getting that clean good information so that they can make good decisions as well with their advisors on what to register for and how to complete their degree in a timely manner. And so all that information combined with the process of getting curriculum approved, getting it published, getting it into the student's hands, and that can be very time consuming. So wherever we can remove barriers, I think that's really what everybody's trying to do. It doesn't always work out great, but I think that the point is that we're all trying and continuing to get better. And I think it's important in order to do that, you have to have the right tools in place, like I mentioned before. And I think that that's something that we've really strived to do at Solid community College. And so that's really exciting for us. And I think that a good way, and I think our students are seeing some of that success of cleaning up that information, making it available sooner as soon as we can.  

Shauna Cox (12:58): I want to pull from your playbook, if you will, because in a structure like higher ed with these policies, with the various stakeholders, everything can be so time consuming. So what strategies or innovations do you believe are essential for institutions to ensure that their curriculum processes are able to stay adaptable and support lifelong learning opportunities and serve those diverse learners that we mentioned earlier? 

Lyndi Duff (13:30):We've done something recently in our curriculum, and I think that we had a lot of value in updating the process where we had, we call it our technical analysis and compliance group, and they had the ability before it was just kind of like we are going to review it. And it was groups of academic operations and student affairs would review curriculum as it's coming through to be very transparent, to help people, and they would make recommendations and comments and then a proposal would get to the end and those weren't addressed. And so there was delays and things because of that. So we added a process and got authority from our curriculum committees to say, okay, let's give this group a little bit more teeth to say, okay, you need to address these things before they get moved on. Because what you see is in downstream, those things are negatively impacting students either in their program of study or maybe it's just more time consuming to get it approved with the accrediting body because we didn't have the right information. 

Lyndi Duff (14:37):So working with committees to say, this is something we're seeing, the proposals are getting to the end and there's some problems with the proposal still, how do we clean that up to help improve not only the faculty and administration's experience as they're reviewing stuff, but then at the end they're able to have a really good proposal that we can enter into our student information system so that we can get that hand into the catalog and our accrediting body and department of education because we have a complete picture of everything that we have received. So I think that because of that continual listening, because of that continually trying to tweak the form to get the right information. We had an example of we had our accrediting body is northwest, and one of the things that they require is what is your assessment plan? And we weren't asking for that upfront, so we were having to wait at the end and gather that information, which was delaying the approval time. 

Lyndi Duff (15:43):So we added a question into the form for our programs, and now we're asking for it at the beginning so we don't delay it unnecessarily towards the end of the process. And so you have the tools working together, different various bodies from the institution working together to improve the form, and then in the end, it's streamlining the process to get it done faster because you have all the right information that you're collecting. I think that by doing all those things and being adaptable, you're going to be able to, in the end, just have a better product for everybody, for not just students, but for administrators and the people who have to consume all that information as well. 

Shauna Cox (16:28):Efficiency is key, and at the end of the day, it's truly a win-win for everyone. So need those processes in place and you have provided some great insights and tools and everything, so I really do appreciate it. But before I let you go, those are the questions I have for you. One more important question is you are based in the Salt Lake City area. Where do people need to go to eat if they visit? 

Lyndi Duff (16:52):So one of the places that I constantly go with my team and anytime we're celebrating any kind of success, so we go to a Mexican restaurant called Cafe Sylvester. It's right by solid community college and it is some of the best Mexican food. It is family owned, and we just love eating there. It's my favorite. I 

Shauna Cox (17:12):Love it. Lyndi, thank you so much for joining me. It was a great pleasure chatting with you. 

Lyndi Duff (17:17):Thank you. I'm glad to be here. And it was a lot of fun to visit with you as well.