Promoting High Impact Practices: An Institutional Initiative Update

Three years after our 2020 OLC Accelerate presentation, and as we wrap up our 5th year of our Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP), we pause to reflect on the growth of high impact practices at our university and the evaluate the success of leveraging our LMS (Canvas) and other collaboration tools to distribute information and create a community of practice. We have expanded our efforts to include establishing a learning community for a new initiative, the university-wide HIPs and Student Success (HIPs) Faculty Fellows.  

High impact practices (HIPs) provide significant learning benefits, especially to underserved students (i.e., first-generation, transfer, and racial/ethnic minorities), but students in these groups are less likely to participate in HIPs than students in more traditionally advantaged groups (Finley & McNair, 2013). 

To answer the call to “adopt intentionally structured curricula that make HIPs more widespread and more available to all students” (Kinzie, 2012), our institution began a multistep process to document the existing implementation of HIPs and establish systematic processes to promote their inclusion in courses including online and blended modalities. In 2020, this work supported multiple goals of the University Strategic Plan and Academic Master Plan including offering outstanding undergraduate and graduate programs, promoting degree completion through outstanding curricular programs, preparing engaged citizens that contribute to their communities, and providing an inclusive, accessible, equitable campus climate that supports all members of the university community. At present we are creating a new Academic Master Plan, and support for high impact practices such as the HIPs Faculty Fellowships will continue as an institutional priority. 

As a young institution, independently accredited since 2009, we serve a non-traditional student body in which 100% of our students transfer from other institutions, and we have adopted a number of high impact practice initiatives. The first institutional level high impact practice was our Writing Intensive (WI) courses, adopted from our parent institution and modified when we were independently accredited in 2009. Study abroad procedures were implemented in 2014, and student internships in 2015. The service-learning task force was created in 2014 and quickly established an advisory board and guidelines for SL course designation, peer review, and service-learning faculty fellows. From that work grew the Faculty Center for Civic and Community Engagement in 2019 to expand the reach of service-learning. And in 2018, the Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) was launched to improve undergraduate writing through our Writing Intensive/ Instructive (WI) courses.  

When we reviewed our institutional efforts in 2020, we found that in addition to these university-level plans, individual faculty members were incorporating HIPs into their courses such as performing research with undergraduates in online courses, building community gardens on the second floor of the library, and staging a simulated burial site on campus for forensic anthropology investigations. 

When conceptualized as discrete initiatives, resources to support faculty work implementing these HIPs were scattered across multiple offices or were entirely lacking, procedures for routine review and revision by faculty were ill defined, and institutional assessment efforts failed to capture the opportunities faculty were offering students to most effectively impact their learning. 

To overcome this fragmentation, faculty members with the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning created an organization in the LMS to compile research supporting each HIP, house documents and materials in one place, organize faculty learning communities, develop assessable learning outcomes, and highlight faculty work in their courses. Pulling these materials together led to the identification of gaps and inconsistencies in procedures that prompted an action plan to address these issues and better unify the institution’s approach.  

In 2020, outcomes of this work revealed that many faculty members were engaged in HIPs, and some HIPs were embedded in required courses, enabling access to these learning experiences for all students. Our aspirational goals were to promote the inclusion of HIPs into multiple program courses and provide equitable access to the most impactful learning experiences for all students. 

In 2022, the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning and the Faculty Center for Civic and Community Engagement merged to become the Center for Faculty Engagement. Supporting high impact practices is a priority of the center. In addition to the ongoing Service-Learning faculty fellowships, in 2023, we started the new, HIPs & Student Success faculty fellowships.  

This new initiative is committed to fostering the development of engaged faculty members through a summer learning community experience. Participating in the online learning community (Canvas/Teams), the HIPs faculty fellows explore high-impact practices and equitable pedagogical strategies to meet student learning needs more effectively. Fellows develop course/program materials to implement or refine a high-impact practice or resource materials to support student, staff, and faculty awareness of and importance of HIPs. Fellows help guide their colleagues to HIPs resources and provide examples of implementation grounded in evidence-based practices.  

This presentation will summarize our plan to promote HIPs at our institution, provide a list of resources participants can use to support HIPs at their institutions, and stimulate sharing of HIPs resources between presenters and attendees. 

Participants can engage with the content presented by: 

1. Viewing the demonstration of the function of the HIPs organization and the HIPs Fellows online learning community.  

2. Accessing the list of resources to support the inclusion of HIPs in the curriculum so they can include them in their own institutions’ efforts. 

3. Review examples of how participants may address similar organizational issues at their institutions and solicit recommendations from the presenters.  

4. Respond to a link to solicit additional resources to address HIPs-related issues in a crowd-sourced online document that will be available to all attendees. 

After the session, attendees will be able to 

1. discuss an example of scaling high impact practices at the institutional level, 

2. identify ways to facilitate collaboration across the institution to promote the inclusion of high impact practices in the curriculum,

3. include research citations and links to best practices regarding HIPs in their own institution’s resource archives.