Emerging Leaders are UPCEA members who are mid-level professionals who aspire to more senior roles in PCO. Sessions throughout the Annual Conference are tagged “Emerging Leaders,” which means that they are designed to offer skill development in areas critical for senior leadership like strategic planning, innovation, and leading teams; networking with peers; and informal mentorship with senior leaders.
Attendees are welcome to self-select into this group and attend Emerging Leader sessions as desired. Emerging Leaders are also welcome to pair up with a Conference Buddy.
Conference Buddies are engaged UPCEA leaders who have volunteered to mentor Emerging Leaders throughout the conference. Emerging Leaders are invited to sign up in advance (click here), or simply come to the Waterview Room during the Networking Break on Wednesday, March 14, 3:30-4:00 PM. There, Emerging Leaders will be paired up with “buddies,” meet other Emerging Leaders for peer networking, and learn more about connecting throughout the Annual Conference.
Wendesday March 14th | 3:30-4:00 PM
Emerging Leaders and Conference Buddies Meet
Location: Kent AB
Wednesday March 14th | 4:00 - 5:00PM
Community-University Boundary Spanners
Track: Community and Economic Engagement || Level: Applied || Tag: Emerging Leaders || Location: Dover AB
This professional development workshop provides an opportunity for outreach and engagement university personnel to coalesce around their roles, skills, values, opportunities, and challenges, and learn new ways to strengthen outreach and engagement practices. During this workshop, staff will identify their distinct roles, skills, and professional identity as boundary spanners, as well as identify a community of practice as a strategy for strengthening outreach and engagement practices. Those staff whose job responsibilities include coordinating and supporting campus outreach and engagement programs, and who want to engage in individual reflection on their own work and practice, as well as their role in and contribution to larger outreach and engagement systems should attend.
Moderator: Long Huynh, Kansas State University
Thursday March 15th | 8:00 - 9:00AM
Managing a Diverse Program Portfolio
Track: Business & Operations || Level: Applied || Tag: Emerging Leaders || Location: GB 9-10
Learn about human resource perspectives related to managing a portfolio of diverse continuing education programs and offerings that often require varied leadership approaches. The presenters will outline project management tools that have helped them as managers while empowering staff to take ownership of projects. This presentation will help attendees learn how to better articulate staffing and resource needs to senior leadership. We will conclude by exploring the theme of leading through change, acknowledging budget constraints and the need to justify staffing decisions to your team and senior leadership.
Moderator: Kris Rabberman, University of Pennsylvania
Thursday March 15th | 9:30 - 10:30AM
It Takes a Village: A Blueprint for Planning Successful Short-Term Study Abroad Programs
Track: International || Level: Applied || Tag: Emerging Leaders || Location: Laurel CD
This session is for those who are responsible for developing, leading, or managing short-term education abroad programs. We will cover a full spectrum of topics from program development, risk mitigation, coveting institutional buy-in, design and implementation and everything in between. This session will also explore the roles and responsibilities of upper administration, faculty, staff, students, marketing, travel, operations, and external and overseas stakeholders.
Moderator: Mary Angela Baker, Salisbury University
Thursday March 15th | 1:45 - 2:45PM
Spatial Thinking and Strategic Decision-Making in Continuing Ed
Track: Marketing, Enrollment & Student Services || Level: Foundational || Tag: Emerging Leaders || Location: GB 3-4
Spatial thinking harnesses the ability to use space to analyze demographic data for assisting in strategic planning, locating potential collaborations, and rethinking marketing strategies. To think spatially with regard to marketing continuing education programs is to consider location, distribution, associations, and networks. It is to question why people and institutions are located where they are and to visualize relationships that may or may not be obvious. Using ESRI’s ArcGIS, Google Earth, internal and external data, the Continuing Education Program at Temple University now performs software-based queries and analysis of the spatial distributions of our constituencies to visualize participant distributions, dispersion, and proximity, all of which can be used in planning. This interactive session will offer participants thought-provoking spatial-thinking activities, demonstrate both proprietary and free software for GIS and related inquiries, and discuss the results, to date, of our work in the office of Continuing Education at Temple.
Moderator: Joellen Shendy, University of Maryland, University College
Thursday March 15th | 4:30 - 5:30PM
Higher Ed Technology Trends Impacting Teaching and Learning
Track: Online Administration || Level: Applied || Tag: Emerging Leaders || Location: GB 7-8
From cloud-based resources and wearable technologies to augmented and virtual reality and driverless vehicles, a steady stream of technological advances will continue to impact learning in unexpected ways. We will discuss the latest technology trends in higher education and how they will impact the online and traditional classrooms while exploring student-centered learning and heutagogical practices. The concept of heutagogy expands our current thinking of pedagogy and andragogy to look at self-determined learning. Emerging technologies support heutagogy by making learning more pervasive and ubiquitous, giving learners more opportunities to determine what, where, when and with whom learning takes place. Connecting information from a variety of fields and individuals is necessary to add depth and breadth to the self-determined learner's knowledge base. As educators, we can create the curiosity to find and explore connections between many sources while using emerging technologies that can lead learners to new knowledge and enhanced learning. As the need to justify technology expenditures grows, the presenters will share results of a case study of learning at scale at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and how multimedia learning was used to improve learning performance.
Moderator: Nancy Coleman, Wellesley College
Balancing Work, Family, and a Terminal Degree: Completion Strategies for Professional Development Professionals (Or, UPCEA Members as Nontraditional Degree Seekers)
Track: Career Development || Level: Applied || Tag: Emerging Leaders || Location: Kent AB
This interactive discussion will provide you with insights on how to balance the demands of a 40+ hour/week job, family/personal life, and the pursuit of a terminal degree. Whether contemplating the journey or already under way, this session will help you see it to completion and avoid becoming ABD.
Moderator: Amy Heitzman, UPCEA
Friday March 16th | 9:45 - 10:45AM
Bringing Mobility Skills To the Forefront: A Critical Role for Professional and Continuing Education
Track: Program Planning & Implementation || Level: Applied || Tag: Emerging Leaders || Location: GB 7-8
Soft skills, non-cognitive skills, nontechnical skills, interpersonal proficiency are terms used to describe the ‘people skills’ identified by employers as essential for success in today’s workplace. A more current term, mobility skills, describes how these skills help learners move laterally (across disciplines) as well as vertically (within them). Despite the growing need, employers increasingly complain of a gap in these skills in new graduates. Why are they underdeveloped in higher education, and what can professional and continuing education units do to address this need? This session will propose answers to those questions and inspire others to take action through highlighting national and international work on mobility skill development in higher education, and through providing examples from the University of Utah and the nonprofit Education Design Lab of initiatives to develop and authenticate mobility skills in both adult learners and degree-seeking students.
Moderator: Barbara Kessler, University of Virginia