Ben Liddle

You were nominated because of your contributions in redoing the NTID curriculum. Can you tell us a little about this?
I was given the responsibility to work with a group of 11 department chairs and our full [NTID] faculty...I think the important point there is that I didn’t do this myself. This was the result of three years of intensive work by the faculty within the college.

First of all, we established some enrollment goals for ourselves in terms of where we thought our deaf and hard of hearing students would be enrolled in 2010. We wanted to move to three different career program paths. The first would be career-focused associate degrees. We had always offered career-focused associate degrees; that’s not new, but we wanted to consolidate some programs.

The second part of it is a new initiative to develop transfer associate degrees. “2+2 or 2+3” is what we’re calling it, and the idea behind these degrees is that we wanted students to be able to have an experience with us as a college that would directly lead the student into a degree with one of the other seven colleges at RIT. 80% of the credits that the students get in the two-year degree are transferred directly into the program at the accompanying RIT college.

We also, in the last three years at NTID, developed a four-year bachelor’s program in ASL and English Interpretation. That program was approved last year and we just offered it this past fall for the first time. We also offer a teacher education graduate program. It’s a master’s of science in secondary education for teachers of the deaf.

The last pathway — again, it’s not a new program — is the baccalaureate program and the grad degrees for deaf and hard of hearing students. What we’re trying to do there is to have about 45 percent of all the deaf and hard of hearing students on this campus be in baccalaureate programs or graduate programs. Right now we’re at about 43 percent, so we’re trying to increase that number.

The other thing that we did was... consolidate the support departments with our technical or our associate degree faculty departments so that we now have one department. That department is now responsible for working with students across the continuum.

It seems that you combined a lot of things that were separate beforehand. What kind of response has that gotten?
We just finished the last consolidation this last fall, so we haven’t had a full year yet where we’ve had a department completely merged. We’ve gone from 20 departments to 11. We’re trying to make it transparent for the students and for the other colleges. Change is not easy and we’re changing the culture here and we’re working through that right now. It’s a process. I can’t tell you today that everybody’s happy, but I think that the goal is to try to...make sure that we’re meeting the needs of our students.

Tell me more about the “Communication Outcomes.”
There are three communications outcomes: e-mail etiquette, face-to-face communication, and presentation skills. Students are required to take a communications course and the outcomes are embedded in the communications course. They are also intentionally embedded in other courses. And then when the students get into their last year...the communication outcomes are measured in the capstone course.

If you had to change one thing about how the curriculum changes went, what do you think it would be?
If there was one thing I would change, I guess I’ve learned how important getting the message out is. One thing I would change would be to have used more opportunity to have more frequent updates for our faculty. I’d also like to say one other thing. We’ve tried to do this major curriculum revision at the same time that we’ve hired 24 new full-time faculty [members]. I think that’s not an easy thing to do because both of those processes require care and concentration and thoughtfulness. Sometimes I think we have been pulled in two very important directions at the same time.

What can we expect to come next?
We’re going to explore some additional associate degrees. We’re going to expand the number of students in the interpreter training program. Next year, we’re going to have 145 students in that program. We’re always having our antenna up to see if there’s any new career- focused associate degrees that we should consider offering.

Is there anything else you’d like to say to RIT?
You can develop curriculum and you can hire faculty, but we measure our success here by our retention and our graduation rates, and so we have kept that as our beacon throughout all of this curriculum development work. If students don’t persist here, and if we aren’t able to show strong retention and strong graduation, this will be for naught.