The Regional Higher Education Study Committee, co-chaired by Senior Vice Provost for Instructional Innovation Brad Cohen and Ohio University Southern Dean Nicole Pennington, is making progress on a set of recommendations that will identify opportunities for further growth for OHIO’s regional campuses.

The desired result of these efforts is to develop a model that will achieve a more nimble and responsive University system that is sustainable and can meet the needs of rapidly changing communities around the state.

Pennington and Cohen visited each of the regional campuses in April to meet with faculty and staff to create an accurate landscape to help advance the work of the full committee, which formally began meeting every two weeks in May. Information about each campuses’ strengths, opportunities and concerns from faculty and staff were collected from stakeholders at each campus.

This past summer, the full committee worked to establish guiding principles for moving through the process, as well as developing ideas for a sustainable future for our regional campuses. To foster transparency throughout the process, regional faculty and staff were emailed notes after each committee meeting.

Some of the initial work involved educating committee members about our regional campuses.

“We have a diverse group of committee members who don’t necessarily come from a regional campus,” said Pennington. “Therefore, the committee felt it was of critical importance to spend a large part our time just familiarizing everyone with the intricacies of our regional campuses.”

In June, the group began a benchmarking process. Cohen and Pennington also attended national conference with regional branch campus administrators from across the United States. After the conference, the committee engaged 32 of those institutions in an electronic survey to learn more about their best practices.

“What was interesting was that no one singular model emerged as from the research that we conducted, Cohen said. “Most institutions are all doing very different things. We did, however, glean some insight into different ideas based on operation and organization of structures that we will continue to consider as we work through this process.”

A subset of the committee will be meeting with regional faculty at their annual meeting on Aug. 25 to provide an update of the committee work.

Dr. Nellis has also recently announced that his first Breakfast for Progress, to be held on Aug. 29, will focus on how we can become more interconnected through our regional and extension campuses in a way that will bolster our region and our ability to have a greater impact through access to excellence.

On August 31, the full committee will join a select group of survey participants from South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, and Miami of Ohio via a Zoom meeting to learn more detail about their respective structures and organization.

Throughout the process, the co-chairs have also been engaging with representatives from OHIOs Board of Trustees through a monthly call to update them about the committee work and ensure they are appraised of the committee’s progress.

The committee will deliver recommendations for achieving a sustainable academics and resources model for OHIO’s regional campuses that aligns with the entire University and its OHIO for Ohio strategy to Dr. Nellis by Nov. 1.