James Gepperth

I am the disability accommodation coordinator at our school although I work with several others as a team. What comes to my mind when taking this course is the training our admissions staff will need to effectively work with incoming students.

We have been reviewing our processes at the school for handling disability accommodation requests and I know this course will help with this effort. We offer courses online, so universal design is important to us, especially inside our learning management system.

In my twenties, I worked with students K-12 with developmental disabilities. This was in the late 1980's and 1990's. I learned a lot about individual goal planning and adapting lesson plans to help students learn. Fast forward, now I am in my late 50's and working in higher education. I am glad I had the experience in my twenties because it gives me a larger perspective of the need for educators to know how to serve students K-12 and into high education and beyond. I am excited to put what I am learning into operation at my place of work.

We are in the process of reviewing our accommodation process. I feel that providing training to our staff and faculty is critical. Also, meeting regularly as a team to continue the conversation has been helpful. I have found that there is more interest in doing this right among staff and faculty than I had expected and this helps me feel confident that together we can be an accommodating school.

Although we provide many opportunities for faculty growth and training, we don't define the difference between "in-service" and "professional development". I feel we should do this from this point forward.

After reviewing the content for this section, I feel that we have a pretty good annual performance review process in place for instructors.I do think we could be doing better, however, when it comes to providing instructors with information in real time via dashboards.

I found myself re-thinking how we onboard and train new faculty members. Although I feel we do a good job, it seems to me we could be doing so in a more thoughtful, streamlined manner.

We are expecting instructors to engage more with students other than providing written feedback inside forums and with assignment grades. We would like to incorporate more mini-lectures via audio or video and/or have instructors meet virtually in real time with students. These are unique skills that need to be addressed during the interview. This course has already encouraged me to review our hiring process.

At this point in my leadership journey, I feel it is my job to help and mentor the future leaders of our organization and the world.