Notes from Meetings with Community Members/External Stakeholders/Alums
10-3-12
Review data table from internal stakeholders.
Note what catches your attention (5 minutes)
Go around – What key words, phases jumped out at you?
College of Education Normal School locale—needs to be flaunted. Partnerships, collaboration. Pride of alumni of being a student. Academy high schools—partnerships. Lot of stuff. Draw a focus. Do we allow all students? Number academies in Edmond community. Need to piggyback on this liaison. Define what the community is. How do you expand beyond Edmond and OKC and beyond the community? Not anything about health and wellness in here—we have strong relationship with the Hospital and UCO. Branding with alumni—vocal alumni. Try to convince everyone who walks across the stage to get other alums to do. Performing Arts Center—would be a unique destination stop in the OK area. Public/Public/Private collaboration.
What excites you about this data? Surprises you? What appears to be the most critical? What is missing? Bronco Rail, perhaps Performing Arts Center. Todd Pauley from Congressman Langford’s Office: Opportunity to step up as an International business leader and regional effort. Center of Excellence. Energy, health care, aero space, no connection to military and veterans to re-enter the workforce, internal contracts with government. Coordinating economic development efforts. Don’t see anything about cost, funding, etc. Dr. Betz’ connection to home, connections. Merge “home.” Build this here when they are students. Surprises: Music Embassy idea- love. Critical: having students engaged in internships—important. Marketing programs for children in the summer to 8th graders. Employment for the graduates. Networking—good word—it is who you know. Partnerships are important and how to get people engaged.
When you look at the data, you see that community relationships aren’t as strong as they could be. Why do you think this is?
Could be a sense that it just gets better. Someone thinks there are a lot of relationships. Graduates have same tendencies. Perception of UCO - Why isn’t there a PhD program? Not a research university—can’t be. OU and OSU always had a hand on this. Can never have a PhD program. Regents. Carve out a program for UCO grads. More internships, more practical experience. History in the state evolved to OU and OSU. Regents dole out the $. Know UCO has more students than we have fiscal funding for, therefore can’t add more programs. We can’t we work toward collaborate. State regents don’t have the funding to match the chair. State is evolving and population changing and growing—why can’t we grow people at the doctoral program—at least one. UCO very different now as a graduate of what it was—changed. Rather send child to UCO. Getting younger people so that they can see UCO. Perception needs to change.
What kind of changes will need to happen for UCO to create strong community partnerships and connections?
Way different. It is the responsibility of everyone in the room about the exciting news about UCO. Need functions that we go out and get fired up about this. The celebration last Tuesday was the most exciting moment. Two things: Strong relationship with congress and legislature—lost relationship with civic leaders—needs to be nurtured. Publicity—constant good news stories in the media needs to happen. State university—deserving—greatest Metro University. Separate with the 6 schools—we have to move beyond. Edmond is a great selling point—keep Edmond as well as OKC. Careful when forging new relationships. Good match. Don’t leave strong partnerships behind in your zeal to be greater.
How can you help bring these ideas to action?
Advocacy.
Next intern coming from UCO—Health Care.
Bronchos.com
Energy forum. Legislature get people here—congressman.
Have 8th graders come into the TL building and FS building.
Raise money!
10-4-12
Review data table from internal stakeholders.
Note what catches your attention (5 minutes)
Go around – What key words, phases jumped out at you?
College recruiters in summer programs—why not year round? Economic development of OK—are they looking for more companies to collaborate? Tulsa as the black hole—this data is very OKC focused. Tulsa doesn’t hear much about UCO. They don’t get stories from the papers. Are we an OK U, regional?, OKC? Combining tech with business community in OKC. Why can’t we put satellite in Tulsa? This would be a great opportunity for expansion in the other parts of the state. We are the biggest restrictor of our own thinking rather than opening up our thinking with bigger institutions. We should push to bigger. Branding jumps out. UCO lacks an identity. What is a regional institution? What is a Metro university? Suffered lack of funding due to lack of branding. This holds back UCO. UCO has tremendous change and yet still the same. Maybe UCO is waking up. What do you want to be? The branding that needs to be here needs to figure that out and get an identity. How does a U brand itself? Sports. It’s the front porch. What ultimately do you want to be? If you want to be a Metro U, you will have to change things. Interesting to see if there is a commitment on the part of the leadership if you will carry it out. We need to get out from the Regents and get with OU and OSU. Constrained by regional university system. We will have to push to get to that next level. Governance structure needs to shift or nothing will change. Current board structure is a massive problem. Need to empower the leadership to go forward. It’s political that we don’t have PhD programs, Div. 1 level by our size. Board needs to be focused entirely on UCO. Constitutional board needs to change. Break through the next level. Otherwise, we are rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Mission of Educational College—build up UCO to have a PhD program for education. We can have research be action based. Need to exchange data about how students are doing at UCO—need more data. Regent’s rep says we should be able to gather information beyond remediation rates. Need that data to do the job.Broncho Rail—would be great. Norman to Edmond. Would be highly popular. Engaging alumni is important. UCO has an opportunity to be the brain of the state academic center to build solutions. If we are going to compete globally, we have to fix things locally.
What excites you about this data? Surprises you? What appears to be the most critical? What is missing?
Global competitive. We have to have global respect if we are going to compete. Enable our students to go oversees. Differentiate UCO from other competition? Interwoven throughout data with community and businesses. UCO Prez has global connections. Music, Teaching, Forensics, Funeral Directors—areas to expand on and be globally competitive. Can reach international presence. Our students are the last people who let you down. Energy independence. Accounting Department—no Master’s program—needs it. Opportunity. Engineers—why is there no college of Engineering---- there’s no college of that especially if you want to be a Metro University. No one talks about making it happen. That seems to be low hanging fruit. Leadership in this state is very much into duplicating. Duplication isn’t going to be the smartest thing. 90% of all the programs duplicate each other. So what. Limited funds do hinder that. The more we can touch on those that aren’t touched.
When you look at the data, you see that community relationships aren’t as strong as they could be. Why do you think this is?
Community partnerships are there, but we aren’t aware of them. Why aren’t we aware of them? Bad habit of our campus wearing more OU & OSU gear—keep our UCO gear in the closet. We need to instill more pride UCO—automatic billboard. We are trying to get families to adopt international students. UCO has innovativeness of people. Partnerships are developed by good conversations. If you want a branding movement, need to have more conversations rather than getting quiet about the University and branding. We don’t tell our story! CEO of AT&T is a UCO grad. Stop being the best kept secret. Public Relations are a disaster as is branding. We need to become more beyond OK. Figure out the issues. Need to have a state discussion rather than an OKC discussion.
What kind of changes will need to happen for UCO to create strong community partnerships and connections?
We have to have governance change. This is foundational.
How can you help bring these ideas to action?
Create a new board of Regents. See UCO more involved in Economic Development. Promote this more with University. Alumni Assn. numbers is sad. Try to get alumni to get involved. Find people in the community who are doing big things who are alumni and get them. University doesn’t do a good job of connecting alumni to campus. Have them come to classes and speak. Alumni move on and forget. We need to do more. Do we have a Hall of Fame of our students? 80,000 people don’t go to Norman for a meeting. They go for sports. We need Div. 1 to create visibility, image, and bring alumni back. Liability turned into asset—sports. That’s how you get money, and people to come back. Focused on sports. Focus! Metro U has a business plan for sports! Metro U shouldn’t have a football team but other sports programs that are Div. 1.
Actions:
Expand childcare – bench marks recruiting gifted kids to bring children to college. Go to the campus they know. Education department. Differentiation. U Tulsa school expansion. Another story to tell.
ACM has good connection with board. Film and music are two creative industries that we can connect with. Film is a big opportunity for us. Start thinking about how to tell our story about music. Film is fastest growing.
Summer closed dorms. University should put on camps. Cash cow. Getting potential students on campus and familiar. It becomes comfortable for students.
Languages: teaching more languages. IB Schools. OKC, Tulsa has them. University program. Enables bright students to have the opportunities. Mandatory to teach languages. Many take it for four.
Duke University Campus in Shanghai. Movement to have relationships to build your own campus. What is the name? Something in the global.
Public Information Office at UCO is doing a terrible job of marketing and communications. They get an F for doing a horrible job of putting UCO out there. Feels like as an alumni UCO just wants their money and then to get out of the way. Alumni Assn. doesn’t do the job connecting. Is there a lack of personnel in that office? We don’t have the emotional connections.
Promotion to Oklahoma business people who live in Edmond & work in OKC.
Define more what community is. UCO is known in Edmond, not in OKC.
Metro U: people don’t know what this means. Why don’t people know more about UCO’s unique programs? Marketing poor about telling UCO’s story and their programs.
ACM 100’s in program. People think there are 15 kids downtown.
Bulletin Board.