Third-Year Progress Report
Be responsible stewards of our resources
Educational Innovation was launched as a coordinated effort to create an environment that enhances student learning and research while improving campus capacities and generating new resources.
Administrative Excellence, an initiative to find ways the campus can operate more efficiently and effectively, is in its second year, and projects are under way to achieve significant savings during a five-year period.
The Human Resources Design Project was launched in fall 2011 to create a new personnel system for UW–Madison that will be uniquely tailored to the needs of our world-class research and teaching institution. Project leaders are working with campus governance groups and other stakeholders to develop and synthesize a plan for the new system, which will be presented to the campus in fall 2012.
The 12th annual Showcase featured accomplishments in campuswide initiatives — including Educational Innovation, Administrative Excellence, and Human Resources Design — as well as dozens of improvements in academic and administrative units across campus.
UWRightNow, a real-time, multimedia project, told the online story of 24 hours in the life of UW–Madison, attracting more than 14,000 unique visitors from 66 countries and all 50 states, and featuring more than 1,000 pieces of website content from UW–Madison students, faculty, staff, and alumni.
Inside UW–Madison, an e-newsletter for faculty and staff, was launched as a new tool to inform, engage, and build the campus community. Sixty issues were published during its first year, with guaranteed delivery in an environmentally responsible manner.
UW–Madison’s global and mobile reach continues to grow dramatically, with more than 30 million visits to the university’s home page (www.wisc.edu). Our mobile and tablet apps were downloaded from every state and 111 countries around the world.
The U.S. Green Building Council selected the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery (WID) as the first Wisconsin laboratory building to receive LEED gold certification, based on energy use, lighting, water and construction materials, and other sustainable strategies. Among WID’s features are geothermal wells placed underground to use the earth’s temperature to help heat or cool the building.
As of March 2012, use of coal has been eliminated on campus, resulting in dramatically lower CO2 emissions.
To mark its 150th anniversary, the Wisconsin Alumni Association announced plans for Alumni Park, a new promenade and green space along the shore of Lake Mendota. A gift to the university, the park will use landscaping, artwork, and gathering spaces to tell the story of how the UW and its alumni have made contributions to the world.
Educational Innovation
Under this initiative, units across the campus are transforming curricula, blending learning options, rethinking interdepartmental collaboration, and expanding opportunities to new audiences. For example:
More than 450 faculty and staff attended a dozen “incubator” sessions and shared existing innovations in curriculum, organizational structures, new revenue, and blended learning.
The Wisconsin Collaboratory for Enhanced Learning (WisCEL) delivered courses to nearly 1,000 students in multi-use spaces with innovative use of technology and pedagogy. Beginning in fall 2012, all pre-calculus math courses will be taught in WisCEL environments.
The College of Engineering is on track with using technology to “flip” 75 percent of their core courses in five years, with early results showing an increase in learning effectiveness.
The College of Agricultural and Life Sciences and the Department of Psychology streamlined their curricula to benefit students while creating new capacities.
New professional master’s degrees in sustainable systems, communicative disorders, and social work are now being offered to fill market needs while generating new resources.
The School of Nursing is continuing efforts to develop leading-edge learning experiences through its state-of-the-art building, partnerships, and transformative curricular changes.
The course-approval process was streamlined and is now online.
The Department of Comparative Literature and the Program in Folklore are joining forces as a new, reconfigured department with a strong interest in engaged research and the Wisconsin Idea. Faculty from three departments in the School of Medicine and Public Health realigned to create two new departments, reshaping their disciplinary focus and increasing their competitiveness.
Administrative Excellence
Strategic purchasing: The university has the opportunity to generate significant annual savings in purchasing by maximizing institution-wide strategies to consolidate vendors, leveraging the university’s scale of purchasing, and substituting purchases, when possible, with preferred options that serve the same functional purpose without sacrificing product quality or service levels. These strategies will be applied to purchases of office supplies, maintenance, operations and repair (MRO) supplies, scientific supplies, and purchases of desktop and laptop computers.
Email and calendaring: By consolidating existing email and calendaring systems across campus and adopting and implementing Microsoft Office 365, the university will appreciate significant savings by avoiding duplicative operating costs on servers, software, licenses, and spam/virus protection.
Data-center aggregation: Recommendations were approved for campus data-center services to improve service levels; minimize data security risks and provide significant savings through avoidance of operating and replacement costs by eliminating duplicative infrastructures and substandard facilities; matching optimized, high-efficiency hosting facilities with service needs; providing consistent service levels across campus; promoting and encouraging best practices (e.g., virtualization); and aligning with the advanced computing infrastructure and the research community to enhance service and risk management.
Human Resources Design Project
This project has undertaken perhaps the most comprehensive outreach ever conducted on the campus to gather employees’ opinions about our work environment.
More than 200 employees, including faculty, academic staff, and classified employees, have served on 11 HR Design work teams, an advisory committee, and three support teams.
To date, more than 7,800 employee and student contacts have been made through 38 forums, five Web chats, and several surveys and polls.