Dear Colleagues,
As we gear up for implementation of the Quality Enhancement Plan, Life After Mary Washington, many of you are wondering what role the competencies play in our conversation with students about life after they graduate from UMW. Think of the competencies as a new part of our university vocabulary that can be used to describe the connection between their academic and co-curricular activities and their life’s next chapter.
What we’ve learned from our recent research is that our students can benefit from more clarity in how they communicate their academic and co-curricular experience as they seek entry to graduate school, service, or the world of work. Making these connections between classroom assignments, a student leadership position, or an athletic team can be difficult, and we can be here to help.
Faculty, please consider any existing assignments you have and how they may align with the competencies. For instance, an assignment that requires students to work in a team to solve a problem may align with the teamwork competency. This assignment could be marked in canvas or your syllabus with the “teamwork” graphic icon.
To make this process easy and give you the most flexibility, the icons are available in the Canvas Commons. Special thanks to Miriam Liss in the Department of Psychology for suggesting that we make the icons available in Canvas for easier access. Jerry Slezak and the team from Digital Learning Support were able to place the icons in Canvas Commons for anyone in the UMW Community to access and use in course and co-curricular communications. The directions to access Canvas Commons after logging into Canvas are:
- Click on the “Commons” icon at the bottom of the toolbar on the left side of the Canvas window
- Search for “UMW QEP”
- The Icon page should be visible as the first choice – click on it to view it
- To download icons from this page, right click the icon image and choose “Save Image As…” from the menu that appears
- Alternately, Faculty could download this page directly to any Canvas course they like which would import all the icon files into the “Files” area of their course.
We hope this will make things easier for all of us to incorporate the competencies into our work with students. For more information on the QEP and the definitions of the competencies, please visit the QEP website.
Regards,
Kimberly Young, Associate Provost for Career & Workforce Jennifer Walker, Associate Professor of Special Education | Program Director of Special Education
