This session will share the University of Arizona Global Campus’s Academic Operations department’s approach to leveraging the continuous improvement process to carry out faculty focused system and process improvement initiatives. The focus of this presentation will be outline the design, development, and implementation of a new adjunct faculty compensation model the university launched in October of 2021, and the continuous improvement process used to evaluate and collect feedback from faculty and staff. This data collection process helped drive data driven decisions on planned improvements to the model for the next fiscal year.
There are many challenges associated with the management of adjunct faculty profiles and operations in an online, asynchronous environment. One of the biggest challenges for our institution was with the centralization of many of the processes, records, and data that exists across various systems at the university. Centralization of these systems and processes has been a major focus for the Academic Operations Department at the University of Arizona Global Campus (UAGC) for the last 2+ years. Despite the successes experienced through these migrations, the academic operations department has operationalized a process to execute the evaluation of systems and processes to ensure continuous improvement of the user experience. This Session will share the continuous improvement process leveraged by UAGC’s Academic Operations department to identify, plan, execute, and review necessary system and process enhancements. We will specifically focus on the design, development, and implementation of a new adjunct faculty compensation model that the university launched in October of 2021, and the process we used to evaluate and collect feedback from faculty and staff to help make informed decisions on planned improvements for next fiscal year, beginning on July 1st 2022. These include system and process enhancements and additional resources developed to best support our diverse faculty population and improve the overall faculty experience.