Roadmap to the SIS Board of Visitors meeting

November 15-16, 2010

Welcome to the 2010 meeting of the School of Information Sciences Board of Visitors. We will open this year’s meeting with an opportunity for Board members to meet some of our PhD students and their work in a poster session on Monday (12:00 noon – 2:00) on the 8th floor of our building. A light lunch will be available. Following the poster session, we will introduce you to new faculty and staff who have joined the School in the past year. They will each briefly summarize the expertise they bring to the School and the directions they are taking in their work here (2:00 – 4:00). You are then offered the opportunity to relax until we reconvene at the Holiday Inn at 5:30 for a reception followed by Provost Patty Beeson delivering the formal charge to the Board at 6:00 pm and dinner at 6:45 pm.

Tuesday, we will reconvene over breakfast at 8:00 am and begin our meeting in earnest at 8:30. Al Moyé, the chair of the Board, has suggested this year’s meeting focus on the School’s assessment processes and the outcomes of these assessments. To that end, you will find an array of documents on the Board website at http://www.sis.pitt.edu/~sisbov/. I encourage you to familiarize yourself with these materials prior to the meeting, and will suggest here specific documents that I think you will find particularly useful as a start.

A good place to begin is with the “School of Information Sciences Update”.  In this document you will find a synopsis of the School’s progress and plans, as well as benchmarking data that compare SIS to a number of our peer iSchools.  Following that, I encourage you to read the “Observations” documents. In these seven documents, the School’s academic leadership reflects and responds to a common set of questions related to changes, challenges, opportunities, and risks.

All of the remaining materials are provided as reference. They include:

  • A description of Pitt’s process for Learning Outcomes Assessment and the 2010 reports from each of the SIS programs.
  • A survey of all iSchools regarding their use of a common introductory graduate course. This has been a recurring topic of Board interest, and one that SIS continues to explore.
  • A presentation summarizing the results of a faculty assessment of the SIS governance structure instituted in 2006.
  • An alumni relations & development progress report from Institutional Advancement.
  • A copy of the 2011 annual plan submission to the Provost and the Provost’s response.
  • A copy of last year’s Board of Visitors report.
  • A short summary of national trends among college students (“Generational Change”).
  • A copy of the recent NAS report “Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Revisited”.

The driving questions for this Board meeting include:

  • To what extent do the assessment processes, outcomes, and programmatic changes support the transformation of SIS into a leading information school in a major research university?
  • What steps must SIS (and the BOV) take to advance SIS’s effectiveness and stature as an information school?
  • What steps can the Provost take to accelerate SIS’s progress?

I look forward to an interesting, creative, and productive meeting.

 

Ronald L. Larsen

 

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