Month: April 2024

Digital Transformation – AI

Dear UW-Green Bay Faculty and Staff,

As part of my email to faculty and staff on January 18, I wrote the following regarding our progress with the strategic priority of Digital Transformation:

Our work to modernize our practices to thrive in a digital world has created positive changes in how we educate, broaden our connections to students, and complete our business functions. Now we need to put increased attention on how technology can further inform our work and prepare our students to thrive in a world where technology is ubiquitous. We will develop clear strategies for how we will use emerging technologies to increase access to education and the quality with which it is delivered. We will begin to use powerful technologies like AI to help us expand the impact of the people who work here. We must use technology to cover the mundane and instead use our “people power” to do what humans do best: communicate, solve complex problems, and inspire others. Given our current budget realities, we must get comfortable quickly with this way of operating. We know we are understaffed. Therefore, we must use technology to manage workloads, inspire human interaction, and increase the satisfaction that our faculty and staff get from doing their jobs.

I was excited to attend a discussion on April 12 with a group of faculty, staff, and administrators from UW-Green Bay organized by Titletown Tech and the Cofrin School of Business around the future of AI in education. We heard from amazing faculty across the University, and it confirmed the positive momentum we could create by connecting faculty with industry leaders all working with AI. To follow up on my January email and the April 12th discussion, I wanted to update you on several ways that we will develop an institutional response to the emergence of AI within education and the workplace and thereby advance our priority of Digital Transformation.

1. Kris Vespia, Courtney Sherman, and Christopher Paquet will create a draft institutional policy on AI to be reviewed for comments and suggestions early in the fall.
2. We will convene industry leaders in AI with a group of faculty led by Jennie Young from UW-Green Bay to share how they are using AI and the numerous ethical issues that we should consider.
3. We will convene a group of faculty led by CATL to advise us on how we should proceed internally with our instructional engagement with AI.
4. We are currently considering an enterprise solution that would enable us to use AI as a communication tool in a cohesive way across the University. This will allow us to broadly explore where we can enhance the student, faculty, and staff experience with the use of AI. We will provide professional development opportunities for staff on AI beginning this summer.
5. We will provide professional development opportunities for faculty this fall. CATL will continue to lead discussions and professional development on the issues of AI use in the classroom in consultation with other experts, such as GBIT, faculty with relevant expertise, and the future enterprise partner.
6. As previously discussed by Provost Burns, departments will establish program-learning AI outcomes for our students this fall.
7. The Cofrin School of Business will pilot the use of AI in classes this fall with the goal of offering it in all their foundational courses by the end of the academic year.

I look forward to continued discussions around this subject and am aware of the complexities around the issue. It is my hope that using AI in thoughtful ways can connect our staff and faculty more directly in a human way to our students, help with workload issues in certain areas, and engage our students in a way that they already understand and will use in the workplace when they graduate. I also think it gives us an opportunity to expand the ways in which we champion a liberal arts education. The use of AI demands that we as humans effectively question, communicate, and think beyond the level of just memorizing information. These are skills that we excel in teaching, and I look forward to creating a conversation around those ideals.

Best,
Mike

Beer Minute

‘Great Duos’ are on Mike’s mind in this week’s Minute as he reminds everyone of the upcoming Beer and Ballet event at The Weidner on May 4, 2024. Who would have thought beer and ballet would mix? The creative minds at The Weidner, that’s who! And what an excellent combination it is. In this week’s Minute, Mike encourages everyone to think creatively…and raise your glass!

Message to Faculty and Staff on Thursday, April 11, 2024

Dear UW-Green Bay Faculty and Staff,

Today, Deloitte’s Financial and Strategic Assessment reports will be released publicly for 7 universities.  The reports discuss the economic assessment and opportunities for us as well as Oshkosh, Parkside, Platteville, River Falls, Superior, and Whitewater.  Attached you will find three documents.  The first talks about our current economic assessment, the second potential opportunities for us, and the third, labeled UW Green Bay UFA, is a summary of the Deloitte reports along with a presentation I gave to the Board of Regents that provides context to those reports.  We will discuss all of this at the Coffee Break on Tuesday, but below are some important things to keep in mind.

Documents can be found here:

UW Green Bay UFA

UW-Green Bay Current State Assessment

UW-Green Bay Opportunity Report

First, the slide shown from Deloitte on page 19 of their Current State Assessment and again on pages 8 and 10 of the summary are crucial to put in context. It takes FY23, which was our worst year by far of the last 6 years, and projects out as if we have not made any financial adjustments in FY24 or planned reductions in FY25.  As a reminder, in FY23, we purposely chose to spend down some of our tuition balance to support our mission.  Page 11 of the summary talks broadly about adjustments we have made in FY24 and FY25 and page 12 outlines the projections for our tuition balance as a result, which shows a much more accurate and positive trajectory for us moving forward.  We pledged to end our “structural deficit” by FY25 and I believe that we have done that with the understanding that changes to projected enrollment can always cause us to have to adjust.  We used flat enrollment as a baseline for our numbers.  The Deloitte reports are a snapshot of our financials in Fall 2023. It is important to recognize this distinction and the heavy lifting you have done in recent months to set the stage for us to move into the opportunities before us.

Second, the structural deficit as defined by Deloitte does not include any revenue that we generate through our Continuing Education Division.  This revenue has been stable for some time now and we continue to seek to grow our presence here in the future as a unique revenue stream that we can rely on.

Third, on page 19 of the summary, I talk about our future plans to keep our budget on the plus side of the ledger and build on our mission.  I discussed further growing our dual enrollment and continuing education work, continually examining the sustainability of our program array, developing Phoenix Innovation Park as an entity that drives enrollment and revenue, exploring additional revenue opportunities for athletics, and continually pushing ourselves to have the strongest possible student support network.

Finally, at the Coffee Break on April 16th, we will discuss some of the other findings in the financial assessment and opportunities.  I have already met with governance leaders at the UC regarding the report.  Nothing in the report is new to us, but having these things validated by a third-party source will be helpful for us to continue to have conversations about our future.

Please feel free to reach out to me directly if you have any questions that you would like clarified.

Best,  Mike

The university financial assessments for seven universities and President Rothman’s statement are now live: https://www.wisconsin.edu/president/strategic-plan/

Design Minute

In this week’s Minute with Mike, UW-Green Bay’s Art and Design program is featured, including Assistant Professor Abbey Kleinert. She shares how students are combining art and science to develop a logo and visual identity for the NERR, and how a RISO printer technology levels-up what students can do. Listen below and check out the Design Arts program.