What makes higher education so important in the United States? Why are universities often such a mystery and controversy in our society? What are the key roles and power structure in the university? What are the realities, issues, and future prospects colleges and universities face? This course provides a foundation for those pursuing careers in academic administration -- and an opportunity for experienced professionals to appreciate the context and breadth of institutions beyond their personal and professional experience. 

This four week course will consist of about 5 hours of asynchronous online coursework and weekly live virtual classroom meetings hosted in Zoom.  Please be sure you are able to join a Zoom meeting prior to these events. Live classroom attendance is strongly encouraged but not mandatory. If you are unable to attend live classroom meetings, recordings of those events will be posted in the course shortly after the meeting. 

Live Video Conference Schedule

All meetings are scheduled for 2:30 PM to 3:30 PM (Eastern)

• Week 1 - Wednesday, 9/2/2020
• Week 2 - Wednesday, 9/9/2020
• Week 3 - Wednesday, 9/16/2020
• Week 4 - Wednesday, 9/23/2020
• Wrap Up - Wednesday, 9/30/2020

Welcome to the Quick Start Guide

This guide is highly recommended if this is your first professional development course with UPCEA. Some tips are provided for navigating the course as well as information about how to obtain technical support. 

Tips for Navigating this Course

• Content pages need to be acknowledged. Once you have read, viewed, or otherwise completed the content, look for the button at the end to acknowledge you have completed the item. Sometimes, this step is required in order to advance to future items in the course.
• Future items may be hidden from view. For example, content for the coming week may not be visible until the course facilitator releases it to the class.
• Some items have prerequisites and do not become available until after you have completed the item it depends upon. Prerequisite items have a grey overlay (making them look translucent) with a lock next to them. When you click on the item, its acknowledgement button will note what item it depends on (see image below for an example).

  

Tips for Working with Discussions

• Discussions will open in a pop-up window when you click Enter the Discussion. Instructions will be posted on the discussion forum that loads in the pop-up window. 
• Important! You cannot edit or delete your discussion posts. It is recommended you draft your post in another document editing app first, like MS Word or Google Docs, then post your final draft to the board. 
• To create a new top level post, enter your post in to the text field editor box at the top of the discussion pop-up window.
• Replying to a post by clicking reply under an existing post will add your post to the discussion thread. Threaded discussion posts appear indented under the parent post. 
• Posts are listed in chronological order with the oldest post appearing at the top. 

Tips for Viewing Videos

• Some videos may be arranged in a playlist. A playlist will automatically play all videos in the series in order.
• The playlist will automatically play through all videos after you start the first video.
• You can view all videos in the playlist by clicking on the playlist icon (see image below where the icon is in a blue circle). You can skip to any video in the playlist by clicking on it.

  

For the Best Experience

• Use either the FireFox or Google Chrome browser app for the best experience. The course has been tested to work well with these two browsers. 

Technical Support

• Email: pd@upcea.edu
• Hours of Operation: 8:00 am to 4:30 pm EST. Expect a response within 1 business day.