MEETINGS
&
EVENTS

COHE22
"HONORS TRANSFORMED"
ANNUAL CONFERENCE

Our annual conference that brings together our members with other higher education leaders from similar institutions. Through collaborative sessions and disussion, the annual meetings provide opportunities for better undertanding and apprecaite of honors education by our colleagues outside of the honors community and positions us to be significan leaders in the national educational landscape.

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November 5, 6, and 7 | In Person | Denver, CO

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Conference Recordings 

Some (not all) of our sessions were recorded. Those that were are listed below with the link embedded into their title. See the panel descriptions below.

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1A Beans to Beanstalks: From Counting to Cultivating. Presenters: Binghamton University, South Dakota State University, Texas A&M University, University of Toledo.

1B Defining the Honors Experience at the South Carolina Honors College: Using Multi- faceted Assessment to Discover, Invent, and Overcome. Presenters: South Carolina Honors College.

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2A Building inclusive honors programs for an increasingly diverse and complex student body. Presenters: CU Denver, Oregon State University, University of Connecticut, University of Utah

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2B1 Perspectives on retention and noncompletion in honors. Presenter: Penn State University

2B2 College-Powered Afterschool Service Learning. Presenter: University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

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3A Innovating to Take the Honors Experience Fully On-line. Presenters: Arizona State University, Oregon State University. 

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 3B1 Thriving in the Heart of a Biomedical Research Hub: Key Challenges and Opportunities at the Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University. Presenter: Florida Atlantic University  

3B2

3B2 A Federal Approach to Honors: Lessons learned at the University of Houston. Presenter: University of Houston.

4A Honors Reboots & Renovations Workshop. Presenters: Binghamton University—SUNY, Louisiana Tech University, Texas A&M University, University of Alabama at Birmingham, University of Toledo.

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4B Conceptualizing Honors as a Service: A Model for Student Success and Cross-Unit Collaboration at the University of Arkansas. Presenter: University of Arkansas.

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2022 CoHE Conference Panel/Presentation Descriptions

1A. Beans to Beanstalks: From Counting to Cultivating. Presenters: Binghamton University—SUNY, South Dakota State University, Texas A&M University, University of Toledo.

Budget realities have driven defensive strategies such as bean counting within higher education. Such reductive approaches fail to recognize the multifaceted contributions of Honors to the student, the institution, the community, and the workforce. While bean counting may sometimes be necessary, it fails to provide a holistic view of the value of honors to the institution and beyond. In this workshop, participants will cultivate new perspectives and growing appreciation for the transformative power of Honors. 

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1B. Defining the Honors Experience at the South Carolina Honors College: Using Multi- faceted Assessment to Discover, Invent, and Overcome. Presenters: South Carolina Honors College.

Since 2020, the South Carolina Honors College has initiated and integrated new assessment measures in an effort to analyze and improve curricular aspects of the college. Although some aspects of this assessment initiative were implemented as a means to aid in the transition to online honors coursework during the COVID-19 pandemic, the effort quickly expanded beyond best practices for honors online teaching to evaluate a wide array of key curricular matters. This presentation will explore the development of a multifaceted assessment process in an honors college situated within a large, public, research-intensive university and discuss how assessment results were utilized to achieve key goals, including increased communication with and education of faculty, staff, and administrators, additional honors course development, and enhanced and improved engagement with campus partners. Specifically, assessment components targeted faculty, students, and administrators and assisted the college in: (1) increasing the overall number of stand-alone honors courses offered each academic year; (2) developing faculty resources and offering regular workshops to improve faculty understanding of honors education; and, (3) implementing an honors course development grant that will allow the honors college to recruit new faculty to develop innovative course options for students. 

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2A.     Building inclusive honors programs for an increasingly diverse and complex student body. Presenters: CU Denver, Oregon State University, University of Connecticut, University of Utah

This session examines the challenges and successes in designing inclusive honors programs for students who do not fit the traditional mold of college students. Each of the presenters has worked to create inclusive communities and curricula for students who are non-residential, are non-traditionally aged, have family caregiving responsibilities, manage health challenges or disabilities, are first-generation, are fully online enrolled or at a satellite campus, or diversify the honors community in myriad other ways. Each presenter will share experiences in developing and implementing innovations that work towards social justice, equity, and inclusion in honors education. 

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2B. Perspectives on retention and noncompletion in honors. Presenter: Penn State University.

Honors programs and colleges typically have some proportion of entering students who fail to complete. Strategies to improve completion rates in honors are based on how we view and address noncompletion. Does withdrawal from the honors college represent failure — either by the student and/or the institution — or is it normal and acceptable so long as the student graduates? This presentation will review approaches to noncompletion by stakeholders of the Schreyer Honors College (Penn State) over the past several years, as well as recent and ongoing initiatives to reduce noncompletion. 

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2B.  College-Powered Afterschool Service Learning. Presenter: University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Interested in addressing an important community need while providing Honors students with 21st century skills? Since 2018, the University Honors Program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has partnered with Community Learning Centers in Lincoln and the state to run Honors Afterschool Clubs in Title I schools. These clubs are created and led by passionate, energetic college students. While there are established benefits for K-12 students to participate in afterschool and expanded learning, our research evaluates the Honors Afterschool Club Initiative (HASCI) programming to see the impacts of participation on college students. 

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3A. Innovating to Take the Honors Experience Fully On-line. Presenters: Arizona State University, Oregon State University. 

In this session, two, 20-minute case studies will be shared. These case studies will highlight the experiences of two honors colleges that made the investment to enable access to the complete honors experience for fully on-line, degree-seeking students. During the case study presentations, experiences in planning and implementation of fully on-line honors will be shared. Case studies will highlight why each institution choose to enable honors program access for fully, on-line students, the stakeholders essential to move this work forward, the activities undertaken both within the college and the institution, the timeframe for planning and implementation, as well as the opportunities and challenges experienced. Based on the case studies, four different areas for development were identified. In the remaining time, table groups will explore these development areas by responding to a series of four prompts (noted below) in a facilitated dialog. Audience members will share their own experiences and ideas and contribute to broader community exploration of innovating to take the honors experience fully on-line. • By what measures should we assess online honors programs? • What are best practices for building community and student engagement in an online honors space? • How do we put in place structures to support online honors students who have a different timeline for degree completion or perhaps are not seeking a degree at all? • How can we most effectively communicate the value proposition of honors to a diverse, online student population? 

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3B. Thriving in the Heart of a Biomedical Research Hub: Key Challenges and Opportunities at the Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University. Presenter: Florida Atlantic University

Over the past 10 years, the Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College, a free-standing honors college at Florida Atlantic University, has nearly doubled the size of its student enrollment (312 to 581) and become an educational partner with the top two biomedical research institutes in the world: Scripps Research Institute (now UF Scripps) and Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience. Most recently, a new FAU High School in Jupiter opened up in partnership with Max Planck. This rapid growth in enrollment has coincided with a rapid growth in students concentrating in STEM disciplines, resulting in an unequal distribution of students between the STEM and non- STEM majors. Our session focuses on four key inter-related issues the college has addressed in delivering its liberal arts and sciences mission within the context of skewed enrollment growth: (a) faculty workloads and hiring strategies, (b) development, (c) curricula and course scheduling, and (d) commitment to the liberal arts. Data related to student advising, senior honors thesis supervision, internships, retention rates, graduation rates, and scholarships will serve as a basis for discussing solutions, while providing a platform for an open exchange and sharing of ideas. 

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3B. A Federal Approach to Honors: Lessons learned at the University of Houston. Presenter: University of Houston.

While most honors programs and colleges across the United States are either centralized overlays that bridge a university’s undergraduate structure, a freestanding college with its own faculty and curriculum, or a decentralized system of largely independent honors programs, the University of Houston has a hybrid, or ‘federal’, system which features components of all three models. The Honors College serves students from across campus with its own faculty (housed in the College and elsewhere) and curricular and co-curricular offerings, and honors programs in the colleges of business, engineering, and, most recently, liberal arts and social sciences partner with the Honors College to extend the reach of honors education throughout students’ undergraduate experience. The presentation will chronicle the history and rationale for this ‘federal’ system at the University of Houston and will discuss the opportunities and the challenges it presents for recruiting, retaining, and engaging students in a limited resource environment.

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4A. Honors Reboots & Renovations Workshop. Presenters: Binghamton University—SUNY, Louisiana Tech University, Texas A&M University, University of Alabama at Birmingham, University of Toledo.

A workshop to generate information on rebooting and renovating honors education for those in the throes of such an endeavor. The workshop will be framed by the experiences of four Honors Deans/Directors who have traversed the path of rebooting or renovating, but the focus will be on the exchange of ideas through structured conversation among all present. 

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4B. Conceptualizing Honors as a Service: A Model for Student Success and Cross-Unit Collaboration at the University of Arkansas. Presenter: University of Arkansas.

At the University of Arkansas, we have greatly expanded our student success efforts in recent years. In 2014, we launched the Path Program, a mentorship and scholarship program, encouraging high-achieving students from underrepresented groups to join and complete honors. Over the last three years, we have implemented and staffed the Futures Hub to assist all honors students in fulfilling their academic and professional development goals. This presentation will outline how both programs conceive of honors student support as service provision. The Path team will provide an overview of the support strategies for individuals and groups that they have developed over the last eight years to meet the needs of the 100 students for whom they have a direct responsibility. The Futures Hub staff will focus upon how they organize their resources, scale the services of four staff members, and collaborate with a wide variety of campus partners to meet the needs of the 4,000 students they share with six academic colleges, and their individual honors programs.

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