Hi everyone! I hope you're all doing well on these cool grey days!

I spent most of last week at the WCET Annual Conference, including the one‐day SAN preconference. It's nice to get ton spend some time with the small group of individuals who do this work at other colleges and universities, hear what they're doing and talk about upcoming issues and concerns.

Presented on panel with Phil Hill from MindWires and Carolyn Fast from The Century Foundation on the changing OPM market, regulatory landscape and what may be coming in the future. Phil ha a great series of blog posts and a graphic that equates the OPM landscape to the Mad Max franchise that is def. worth a read. You can see the most recent post
on this topic here: https://philonedtech.com/opm‐market‐landscape‐and‐dynamics‐summer‐2022‐updates 

In summary, it was great session with some wonderful discourse between the three of us and followed by amazingquestions and interactions from/with the audience ‐ I wish we had made slides that I could share but we didn't use or make any. I did however manage to only use "shiny and chrome" once in a response trying to stay on theme with Phil's
Md Max analogy.

I also had the opportunity to participate on another panel with Marianne Boeke, Interim President of NC‐SARA, Heather DeLange from CDHE, and Dierdre Coulter from WICHE on compliance management of out‐of‐state activities. The preparation for this session really made me think ‐ beyond the way we report on our out‐of‐state placements and activities, how do we do this? I'm guessing like mine, your information on these activities is done in a myriad of ways with multiple contacts and touch points a few spreadsheets from a couple different departments and program and emails.... am I getting close?

Tracking these experiential learning opportunities for our students is hard and something that many many of us in stateauthorization land are looking into this year. And in that exploration is coming the realization and understanding that we don't want to just collect out‐of‐state. Sure, we only have to report those that leave our state for experiential learning, but what about the students that don't leave the state for placements? Where are they going, do we know why? Really, there's no reason we can't use this as an opportunity on campus to work with other areas, learn more about what they do and potentially assist in the development of a larger off‐campus opportunity tracking process that can assist the various departments and colleges, as well as units like career services, in making connections and developing future plans and strategies for educating the students on our campuses.

I was excited to learn that the College of Education and OIT on the Boulder campus were already starting to work on something that would do just that, collect all the information. We've recently had the opportunity to sit down and go through some of what they're developing and now we're getting ready to slowly introduce the possibility to other units on campus to gauge their interest. If this is something that gains wide support, Boulder will absolutely share this tool for other campuses to use. But in the meantime, how are you tracking out‐of‐state activities? Who else uses this data and for what? Is this an easy task? LOL no not by any means. There's a reason that a lot of us are just getting to it now.

I just got my reminder at Boulder that it's almost time to start the Catalog review process. The wonderful people in the Registrar's Office let me crash this party every year to ensure that things like state authorization and professional licensure are well documented in the catalog, the text isn't misleading, and that our relationships with our accreditors is articulated properly. This kind of "compliance management" is something that we should have as part of our annual review processes. So, who does this on your campus and how do you make sure the language remains accurate and up to date in publications that students will read and access?

And finally ‐ don't forget it's almost SARA Renewal season! Our renewal alerts will be sent out sometime between 11/25‐ 12/2 and everything will be due right after Christmas so it might be a good idea to get a head start on the document or info gathering now as well as getting on your Provost's calendar for a short walk through of what they're signing so you can turn that all in to the SPE before you go on holiday break/vacation. My November email will have reminders about each section and info on what we're going to need to include with our renewal application.

Have a great rest of your week!

Erika

Erika G. Swain
Associate Director for State Authorization
Office of Academic Affairs
University of Colorado System
e: swaine@cu.edu
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Assistant Director for Compliance and Authorization
Office of Data Analytics | Office of Institutional Research
University of Colorado Boulder
e: Erika.Swain@colorado.edu
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o: (303) 735‐8184