POCATELLO – American Falls native Juan Martinez, a recent graduate from the College of Arts and Letters at Idaho State University, was awarded a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship in Mexico slated to begin in August.
In this Issue
News Bites
ISU Upgrading DegreeWorks Software
Over the next two years, Idaho State University (ISU) is upgrading its Degree Works software to provide students with additional course scheduling capabilities and advising support as well as assisting the colleges by increasing course scheduling capabilities.
Dr. Laura Woodworth-Ney, Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs, assigned a project team in January 2016, to research the requirements and implement modules called the Student Educational Planner (SEP) and the Curriculum Planning Assistant (CPA). These modules work in tandem with Banner and existing Degree Works programs by significantly augmenting students’, advisors’ and faculty’s program and course scheduling capabilities.
“Implementing the new Degree Works modules takes degree and curriculum planning to the next level,” Woodworth-Ney said. “As a university, we are always looking for tools that increase student success and these software modules will help all of us achieve that goal.”
The SEP module will provide students and advisors the ability to more effectively layout prerequisite and course requirements needed for graduation, assist by projecting course needs when changes to programs occur or when a student decides to change their major, and empowers students to map out their registration requirements more efficiently.
The CPA module helps administrators and faculty project curriculum management needs based on students’ progressing through their programs. It also provides program management data to the Institution. Using these capabilities, CPA could reduce the time it takes students to graduate by streamlining the scheduling of course offerings.
Students, faculty and staff will receive regular updates beginning Fall Semester as the implementation dates get closer. “These are powerful tools for ISU to bring to bear, and there will be a learning curve, but I am confident that positive results will quickly follow,” Woodworth-Ney said.
For more information, please contact Darren Blagburn, Institutional Effectiveness, 373-1846 or blagdarr@isu.edu.
Faculty/Staff Updates
Mona Xu Publishes Article
Xiaomeng "Mona" Xu (assistant professor of psychology), Sierra Kauer (doctoral candidate in experimental psychology), and Samantha Tupy (doctoral candidate in clinical psychology) have had an article accepted for publication in Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology: "Multiple-choice questions: Tips for optimizing assessment in-seat and online."
Robert Lion and Alexander Bolinger’s paper accepted for publication in Performance Improvement Quarterly
Drs. Robert Lion (assistant professor of human resource development) and Alexander Bolinger’s (assistant professor of management) work on “An assessment of pronouns as linguistic cues for predicting work attitudes” has been accepted for publication in Performance Improvement Quarterly. Their research explores a hypothesis by former U.S. Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, that frequent use of the pronouns "we" and "they" in describing their employer can predict employees' job attitudes and level of work engagement. Lion and Bolinger find that Reich's intuition was at least partially accurate, but that the relationship is more complicated and nuanced than Reich supposed.
Katherine Reedy Publishes Articles
Dr. Katherine Reedy has published articles in two publications on fisheries and Aleut/Unangan communities in the Pribilof Islands of Alaska:
Lyons, Courtney, Courtney Carothers, and Katherine Reedy 2016. A tale of two communities: Using relational place-making to examine fisheries policy in the Pribilof Island communities of St. George and St. Paul, Alaska. Maritime Studies 15:7. DOI 10.1186/s40152-016-0045-1
Lyons, Courtney, Courtney Carothers, and Katherine Reedy 2016. Means, meanings, and contexts: A framework for integrating detailed ethnographic data into assessments of fishing community vulnerability. Marine Policy http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.
Employment
The following department has a potential transfer opportunity. For a complete job descriptions and application instructions visit jobs.isu.edu. Employees who hold permanent status in any of the following classifications may also contact the hiring departments directly to submit a resume and any other requested application materials.
Facilities Services, Office Specialist 2, Apply by 5/22/16
Please visit jobs.isu.edu for a list of all current Classified, Non-Classified, and Faculty job openings.