Category Archives: For Faculty Archive

For Faculty Archive

Summer 2023 travel seminar proposals due Aug. 25

Interested in leading a travel seminar next summer? Submit your travel seminar proposal by Thursday, Aug. 25, through Qualtrics. If you are new to leading a travel seminar, please reach out to Maria Rohach, director of education abroad, to set up a meeting to discuss your ideas and learn more about the process.

A travel seminar is a short-term, faculty-led study abroad (or domestic) program. This is an opportunity to teach a course that integrates an academic experience with intercultural and experiential learning while traveling. The Global Engagement Office is excited to work with you on developing these intercultural learning experiences for students.

— Maria Rohach, Global Engagement

For Faculty Archive, For Staff Archive

Drake Intercultural Community Exchange Fall 2022 sign up

The Office of Global Engagement is excited to kick off the Fall 2022 intake for Drake Intercultural Community Exchange (DICE). This volunteer program matches faculty and staff (and their families) with incoming international students for a term (or longer), with the goal of fostering meaningful connections beyond the classroom.

DICE hosts would be expected to reach out to their student two or three times a semester to grab a meal, participate in a shared interest, or meet up at DICE/ISSS-sponsored events. Participating as a DICE volunteer is open to ALL Drake faculty and staff. The only requirement is that you have a strong interest in developing an inclusive community and the desire to make our international students feel welcome.

This second year is also unique – we will now be opening our search for hosts to Drake-affiliated community members in the greater Des Moines area. If you know any interested parties, feel free to send the application to them.

If you are interested in becoming a DICE host, please complete our online application: http://drake.qualtrics.com/DICE_HostApplication

If you have any questions about the program, please send inquires to Jorona Johnson, international student advisor, at jorona.johnson@drake.edu.

— Jorona Johnson, Global Engagement

For Faculty Archive, For Staff Archive

Time to play HealthyU BINGO

Join us in July for HealthyU BINGO.  The goal is to fill up a blank BINGO card (or two), during the month, with healthy activities completed from a provided list.  Then, in August, we will get together to play games of HealthyU BINGO for prizes.

You are welcome to fill out the HealthyU BINGO card without playing the BINGO games, but who doesn’t like playing BINGO!

To get started, send an email to linda.feiden@drake.edu. Deadline to register is Thursday, June 30.  All participants will receive an email with an attached packet that includes directions, a list of HealthyU BINGO activities, and a blank BINGO card.  You are welcome to make multiple copies of this card.

Please feel free to reach out with questions.  This is a great event for the whole family!

— Linda Feiden, Human Resources

Campus Announcements Archive, For Faculty Archive

Deputy Provost 2:10: Megan Brown named director of Writing Workshop

Each Tuesday in OnCampus the Deputy Provost shares two articles with a read time of 10 minutes.

Please welcome Professor Megan Brown into an additional new role at Drake University—director of writing.  Starting July 1 as director of writing, Professor Brown will oversee and advise the work of our Drake student tutors in the Writing Workshop; she will also convene and participate in faculty development around the teaching and evaluation of writing across the disciplines.

Megan has taught writing across a variety of settings, and with diverse populations, for more than twenty years, and we are fortunate to have her as both a professor of English and a founding faculty member of the John Dee Bright College.  She is the author of two books, and a dozen articles and essays; at Drake, Megan teaches a range of writing-related courses, including Narrative Nonfiction.

We are thrilled that she will bring her expertise to the Writing Workshop, as well as her commitment to building rapport and community with students and faculty, in the belief that we can all develop our writing skills and capacities.

— Renée Ann Cramer, Deputy Provost

For Faculty Archive

Deputy Provost 2:10: Big announcements for faculty, academic year 2022–2023

Each Tuesday in OnCampus the Deputy Provost shares two articles with a read time of 10 minutes.

Interdisciplinary Intergenerational Faculty Mentoring Cohorts! The office of the deputy provost will provide a bit of training, small stipends, organizational support, and money for hospitality to assistant, associate, and full faculty who volunteer to be part of mentoring cohorts for and with our incoming class of new faculty.  I’m spending the summer organizing the groups – and would love to have you volunteer (if you’ve already emailed, you’re on my list – but I’m still seeking more people to join us).  Email me at renee.cramer@drake.edu with “Mentoring” in the subject line, and I’ll reach out in late July/early August.

Getting Ready to Hire Center for Teaching Excellence Director! After spending a year getting my arms around the newly configured role of deputy provost, I’m ready to begin building out the Center for Teaching Excellence.  In early August, I will circulate a call for CTE Director with details about duties and compensation.  As a preview: the role will begin January 1, and the term will be for three years, with renewal upon review, for up to two terms.  In the fall of 2022, the incoming CTE director will attend the POD Network in person workshop in Seattle, as part of professional development in advance of taking on the role.

I’m making this announcement now so that interested faculty can begin to think about applying.  Please feel free to reach out to me with any questions you have, prior to the announcement of the position.

— Renée Ann Cramer, Deputy Provost

For Faculty Archive, For Staff Archive

Travel policy effective July 1

Finance has completed a periodic review and update to its existing policies. As part of that review, a comprehensive travel policy is being implemented and will become effective July 1, 2022.

The policy combines and replaces two previously existing policies titled Accounts Payable Guidelines and Group Travel. The purpose of the policy is to provide guidance for expenses incurred while traveling on University business. It is intended to comply with Internal Revenue Service (IRS) regulations and the Internal Revenue Code (IRC) definition of an Accountable Plan.

Starting this Thursday, June 30, the travel policy will be available for public review and comment on the Policies under Review webpage. The policy will be posted for comment for two weeks. Please take a moment to review the policy.

— Heather Travis, Finance

For Faculty Archive, For Staff Archive

Coming soon: Drake’s new applicant tracking system

As some of you already know, Drake’s current applicant tracking system (ATS), Hire Touch, is being sunset by the parent company at the end of this year. Drake HR vetted a number of platforms as a possible replacement. We are thrilled to share that our new ATS will be supported by PageUp.

PageUp has a well-established and impressive presence in higher education. Through their platform, we will be able to configure the public facing job page to reflect Drake’s brand in new and better ways than ever before. We will enjoy a more user-friendly design—for both external (applicants) and internal (HR and hiring managers) users. We will also have better ways to run reports and track data—which will help support our efforts to modernize our recruitment practices and strategies.

We are trying to come up with a clever name for the jobs page (and how we refer to it), rather than relying on the vendor name (Drake Careers, Jobs@Drake, something like this). If you have any catchy or clever suggestions, please feel free to share them! If we select your suggestion, we’ll buy you lunch and give you bragging rights over the new name! Send your ideas to drakehr@drake.edu.

As mentioned, we will have some latitude in how we configure the look of the jobs page through PageUp. If you are curious about what the public facing jobs board could look like, here are several examples of other institutions of higher education already using this vendor:

The project team is working on the transition to the new ATS (big shout out to ITS for being amazing partners in this endeavor!), which will likely go live sometime between late September and early November. We need to be off Hire Touch completely by the end of the calendar year.

If you have questions or comments about this transition, please reach out to drakehr@drake.edu.

— Maureen De Armond, Human Resources

For Faculty Archive, For Staff Archive

Seeking home hosts for dinner with international visitors from Africa

Global Engagement is seeking families to provide home-hosted dinners for the 2022 Mandela Washington Fellows

The Mandela Washington Fellowship for Young African Leaders is the flagship program of the U.S. Government’s Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI). The Fellows, between the ages of 25 and 35, are accomplished innovators and leaders in their communities and countries. Drake University is proud to host 25 Fellows from across sub-Saharan Africa for a six-week program June 8–July 17, 2022.

A key component of the program is home-hosted dinners, which provides a great opportunity to welcome the Fellows to Des Moines and showcase our amazing, supportive Drake community! We are seeking home hosts for 1-5 Fellows on the following dates. Home hosts will be asked to pick up their Fellow(s) from Drake West Village at 6 p.m., have dinner together, and drop them back off later that evening.

  • Sunday, June 19th
  • Sunday, June 26th
  • Thursday, June 30th

Please complete this brief Qualtrics form if you are interested in being a home host family!

— Hannah Sappenfield, Global Engagement

For Faculty Archive, For Staff Archive

Information security is everyone’s job

Last fall, Howard University made headlines as the victim of a ransomware attack that forced the cancellation of online and in-person classes. The Washington, DC, institution is not the only university to be impacted by cybercriminals. With vast repositories of sensitive and personal data from students, faculty and staff, colleges and universities are a prime target for attack.

One of the most common attack vectors for ransomware is phishing, which has been around for decades. Phishing is a social engineering technique that uses email to entice or trick unsuspecting people to click on web links or attachments that appear to be legitimate but are instead designed to compromise the recipient’s machine or trick the recipient into revealing credentials or other sensitive information. Phishing presents adversaries with a low-risk method that offers a high potential for financial gain.

Phishing is challenging to fight with technology alone. Many email security solutions still allow up to 20% of phishing emails to be delivered.  Also, anti-phishing technology usually won’t stop email from a compromised University email account because the messages are being sent from a legitimate source. As a result, stopping phishing threats requires vigilance by everyone. People must learn to recognize the signs of a phishing attempt and report these attempts to the proper security staff.

Here are five signs of a phishing attempt

  • An unexpected email that prompts you to change a password, send funds, open an attachment, or log into a website.
  • An email whose body appears to be legitimate but was sent from the wrong domain (e.g., an email that says it is from your bank but was sent from a Gmail account).
  • An email with misspelled words, bad grammar, or poor formatting.
  • An email that contains suspicious file attachments.
  • An email containing web links that are from fake or unknown web domains when the cursor is hovered over them.

To help us all recognize phishing emails, ITS will continue to simulate phishing and assign training to those most susceptible. If you believe you’ve been targeted by phishing, see Reporting a Phishing Message (How-to).

— Chris Mielke, ITS