Education and Research

At the 2014 Planning Implementation Workshop, President Smatresk started the brainstorming session for education and research with one piece of advice. 

“Ask yourselves: If it doesn’t make teaching or research better, than why do we do it?” he said.

He told the participants that UNT needs to create a clear alignment bridge, better aligning its operations and academic enterprise with the university’s mission.

With that direction, the participants brainstormed ways to make education and research stronger while strengthening the connection between the two.  

Some participants called for a culture shift to create a university environment where teaching students is as valued as conducting research and that faculty members embrace their obligation to mentor students in research and education. Several groups also talked about the need to strengthen and professionalize advising to better help students succeed.

Many groups also discussed the need for UNT to better plan its class schedules and course loads so that enough classes are offered at peak times. 

Other groups honed in on UNT’s plans to reach Tier One status, many emphasizing a need for UNT to provide better resources, support and infrastructure to help faculty become more research active while maintaining the balance between teaching and scholarship.  

After hearing discussion leaders share the top priorities, Smatresk recapped the top themes as they emerged:

  • Emphasize collaborative and interdisciplinary research
  • Integrate teaching and research
  • Improve advising
  • Focus on professional development of students
  • Improve faculty-student ratios
  • Reward great teaching and research 

He thanked the group for having such lively, frank discussions about UNT’s challenges and opportunities.

“I thought this was the most diverse discussion we’ve had,” he said. “You focused on the convergence of operations, revenue flow and our academic enterprise.” 

Workshop participants at 12 tables outlined their Top 5 priorities for improving operations and infrastructure. All of those priorities were pulled together for participants to vote on the top priorities they would like to see UNT tackle. 

Here are the top priorities in order of the highest to lowest vote getters:

  • Enhance student experience through undergraduate research, community involvement and mentoring; provide necessary support for student success
    • Provide better support, training and resources for advisors to increase retention and offer competitive pay with opportunities for career progression
    • Implement best practices for student advising
    • Engage students in classroom to make experience relevant
    • Focus on better post-college preparation (Ex: Understand and support the ability for students to be prepared for career after college; provide training and analytical/critical thinking skills; improve reading/writing skills; utilize CLEAR, Center for Learning Enhancement, Assessment, and Redesign, more effectively)
    • Satisfy student expectations for a friendly environment, clear expectations, immediate feedback
    • Better communicate degree and academic plans and options to students
  • Recruit and retain top-quality faculty
    • Strengthen promotion and tenure standards to improve faculty quality
    • Develop a more systematic way to assess workload to ensure faculty members who are lower in scholarly productivity have a higher teaching load; balance faculty workload for efficiency and effectiveness
    • Align rewards with values in merit and promotion and tenure standards
    • Strategically hire senior-level faculty to promote strong academic programs
    • Review and improve hiring and retention of diverse faculty and staff
  • Better support classroom teaching to expand and broaden the student experience; better reward faculty primarily devoted to teaching
    • Reconcile enrollment demands with research demands
    • Make teaching as valuable as research, including better ways to assess and reward teaching; have clear paths for lecturers to advance
    • Create more applied learning opportunities for students including internships, undergraduate research and experiential learning
    • Adjust the ratio of full-time faculty versus adjunct instructors so that a higher percentage of courses are taught by full-time tenure-track faculty, not adjuncts or lecturers
    • Incentivize teaching
    • Better support part-time instructional workforce; support the various types of teachers (lecturers, adjunct instructors, faculty) with more formal programs to improve teaching 
  • Retain students
    • Strategically recruit students from community colleges and high schools
    • Provide additional opportunities for students to engage with counselors and teachers early and often
    • Improve student retention through better and broader student engagement, including on–campus and online students
    • Invest in financial aid operations staff and training to improve customer service to increase student retention
    • Increase informal interactions between faculty and students
  • Provide necessary support for research endeavors and faculty
    • Create research-only faculty roles that are valued based on their defined role; allow faculty to play to their strengths; identify teaching and research roles
    • Encourage more faculty to mentor graduate and undergraduate students in research
    • Establish more and stronger research connections with communities; get community grants as seed money for projects that address major issues/ideas in community
    • Build more facilities to support research (labs, etc.) and provide necessary start-up funds for these facilities
    • Put more "teeth" into post-tenure review process
    • Provide more support for grant writing in research and help identify sources of funding
    • Expand research and economic development office's reach beyond clerical functions
    • Improve and increase teaching and research infrastructure (library, subscriptions, databases, laboratories, research assistants and support staff for educational research)
    • Commercialize more research
  • Create an achievable Tier One plan with a full implementation strategy
    • Develop a strategic research plan and infrastructure to attain Tier One status
    • Fast track development of new Ph.D. programs (especially research/STEM oriented disciplines)
    • Build more and stronger intercollegiate research teams with a focus on interdisciplinary collaborations
    • Create innovative programs to attract new high-quality, diverse faculty and student populations
    • Have year-round outreach programs
  • Build new facilities and  better maintain facilities
    • Create a standardized process involving key stakeholders to improve space accommodation and class expansion to ensure seniors get the classes needed to graduate on time
    • Increase space for teaching labs and classrooms
  • Strengthen quality of academics and student learning experience
    • Increase rigor and challenge in classroom learning
    • Review program curriculum to include interdisciplinary opportunities for students and to better align course offerings with expectation of employers and post-graduate degree programs
    • Improve libraries through better support, funding, accessibility and resources; make it a destination to support faculty and student research
    • Develop a broader understanding and a more effective strategy for online education
    • Gather and use data such as student feedback and employer input to improve overall education
  • Support interdisciplinary collaboration in research and teaching, breaking through bureaucratic red tape. Have each area provide, develop and focus on collaborative research and teaching, as appropriate. 
  • Invest in development of academic and research programs
    • Assign a grant officer to each college for teaching and research programs
    • Provide individualized support for faculty members for identifying grant sources