NSU's Quality Enhancement Plan April 2017

8 | Topic Identification and Development of NSU QEP Strategies and Outcomes Process Summary NSU’s QEP Committee explored dozens of institutional datasets from the past few years to identify expressed areas of need—opportunities on which a QEP might focus. The committee found multiple areas of opportunity across the campus, and subsequently engaged in an intensive series of faculty and student focus groups to surface those ideas that proved to be most valuable across diverse NSU constituencies: undergraduate, graduate, and first professional students. Once the topic of writing was identified, the QEP cochairs worked with faculty members from the Department of Writing and Communication and from the library to draft details of the plan. III. TOPIC IDENTIFICATION AND DEVELOPMENT OF QEP STRATEGIES AND OUTCOMES Topic Naming As previously indicated, through a review of institutional data as well as data collected during formal faculty and student focus groups, the topic of enhancing writing for all NSU students was selected and later ratified by the NSU SACSCOC Advisory Council. An announcement of the final topic was disseminated to the entire NSU community—including students, faculty and staff members, and administrators—through email blasts and was, additionally, prominently placed on the NSU QEP website at nova.edu/qep . The QEP cochairs met with the student leaders of the NSU PanSGA to advise the students of the topic choice and to solicit additional input/information. Based on student feedback, a student naming contest was undertaken. In January 2016, an invitation/contest to name the QEP was emailed to more than 24,000 NSU students, asking for creative names to capture the content area, and offering a $500 gift certificate to the NSU Bookstore to the winner. Students suggested more than 317 unique names. A QEP sub-committee determined a list of 10 finalists, and the full QEP Committee selected the winning entry: Write from the Start . The student winner was notified, given his gift award, and information was disseminated to students and stakeholders and placed on the QEP website. Development of QEP Strategies A new QEP sub-committee, the QEP Proposal Writing Team, was convened in March 2016. The new QEP Proposal Writing Team was composed of the two QEP cochairs, Barbara Packer-Muti and Dana Mills (the latter had replaced Amon Seagull, who left the university); the content area expert, Kevin Dvorak; and one member of the university-wide QEP Committee, Dustin Berna, Ph.D. Packer-Muti and Dvorak reviewed dozens of QEP proposals online that had been previously submitted to SACSCOC, completed an extensive literature review, and brought forward ideas for student learning outcomes that would best measure the learning outcomes for solution strategies previously identified during the review of the nine mini-proposals submitted by NSU faculty and staff members. Packer-Muti then created a program logic model that has served as NSU’s blueprint for its Write from the Start QEP Proposal. A program logic model “displays what a new program or focused change effort might contain from start to finish. The elements in a program logic model consist of the