Category Archives: Archive

Campus Announcements Archive

Water shutdown and power outage to affect campus buildings

Water shutdown

Drake will experience a water shutdown tomorrow, Dec. 20. The shutdown will last approximately seven hours. The shutdown will begin at 10 p.m. tomorrow, and the water will be back on at approximately 5 a.m. on Thursday, Dec. 21. The buildings included in the water shutdown are Howard Hall, Old Main, Sheslow Auditorium, Carnegie Hall, Harmon Fine Arts Center, Turner Jazz Center, Opperman Law Library, The Knapp Center, Cartwright Hall, Jewett Residence Hall, Collier-Scripps Hall, Olin Hall, Fieldhouse, Bell Center, and Facilities Planning and Management .

Power outage

Facilities Planning and Management needs to make minor repair to an electrical switch located near Aliber Hall.  Electricity will be shut off to Aliber Hall and Olmsted Center on Friday, Dec. 22, from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m.

—Jolene Schmidt, Facilities Planning and Management

Campus Announcements Archive

Reminder: Blackboard migration Dec. 23–27

Blackboard will be migrating to a different kind of environment without much change to its users. In order to complete the migration, Blackboard will be unavailable from Dec. 23 to 27. Please be sure to plan accordingly for this migration timeline. After the system is available, faculty may generate course materials and finish their preparations for J-Term and spring courses.

Our move to Blackboard’s SaaS (Software as a Service) will make new tools available and position Drake to provide better online offerings for years to come. The planned migration from managed hosting, which is housed on Blackboards servers, to SaaS, hosted on Amazon Web Services data centers, will occur during winter break to have the least amount of impact.

Once the migration takes place, we will continue running the current experience on Blackboard known as version 9.1. By moving to SaaS, we gain some major benefits from the new environment, which will also allow us to make future upgrades and patches to our environment with little to no downtime.

—Karly Good, ITS

Campus Announcements Archive

2018 mileage reimbursement rate

Drake reimburses mileage for use of personal automobiles by employees for actual miles driven during business travel. The reimbursement rate is based on the current standard mileage rate issued by the Internal Revenue Service.

Effective Jan. 1, 2018, the standard mileage rate issued by the IRS is 54.5 cents per business mile driven, which is up from 53.5 cents in 2017.

The standard mileage rate is evaluated annually by the IRS and is based on an annual study of the fixed and variable costs of operating an automobile.

If you have any questions regarding the reimbursable mileage rate, please visit the IRS website or contact Accounting at accounting@drake.edu.

—Jenifer Baugher, Accounting

Campus Announcements Archive

Facilities Planning and Management welcomes new Bulldog

Facilities Planning and Management is pleased to welcome Patrick Williams to its team. Patrick will serve as grounds supervisor. He holds a Bachelor of Science in horticulture from Iowa State University and has more than 10 years of experience in turf management, including several years as a head golf course superintendent and operations manager. We are excited to have Patrick on board to lead the grounds day-to-day operations and to take our beautiful campus to the next level.

—Aaron Edwards, Facilities Planning and Management

Campus Announcements Archive

Campus-wide fire alarm inspection Dec. 21

Protex Central, a fire alarm systems vendor, will be on site Dec. 21 beginning at 8 a.m. to inspect fire alarm panels in each building on campus. The alarms will sound briefly, but evacuation is not necessary. The inspection will ensure that alarms are working properly and ring directly to Public Safety. The inspections will conclude at the end of the day.

—Jolene Schmidt, Facilities Planning and Management

Strategic Updates Archive

Online programs update

Since the launch of the new online programs, Master of Arts in Communication and Master of Science in Education–Literacy Education, several milestones have been achieved, including the admittance of our first online students.

Landing pages created

Our online program manager, Higher Education, created and posted the first of many landing pages for our programs. These landing pages are designed explicitly to spur potential students to action. These pages are part of different digital campaigns, including a strong Facebook ad campaign. Visit online.drake.edu to view the pages.

Staff trained and ready

One of the important aspects of the partnership between Drake and Higher Education is the transparency of processes. The last three months have been used to ensure systems are working together and that all staff at each institution understands them. This past month, Admissions, the Registrar’s Office, and Online Program staff have been working together to train Higher Education staff on our processes, and we have been learning theirs, including a dynamic dashboard that tracks application status for potential students and provides essential demographic data to assist in communication and marketing.

First admitted students

Both programs have students who have completed their application and been admitted into the program. Currently, there are about two dozen more potential students in the process of applying. It is exciting and gratifying to see the hard work of so many areas culminate into a class of Drake students. We are confident that both programs will have a strong core group of students.

Next Steps

As the programs begin, there is still much to do. Programmatic landing pages will be developed to include some A/B testing, the web pages for online degrees will be developed that will include student support information and guides, and more faculty and instructors will complete the Quality Matters modules and work with our instructional designers. To date, ten faculty and staff have completed the Online Teaching Certificate through Quality Matters, and another four have completed the required modules. Several others are prepared to take courses next year. If you are teaching in the online programs and are not sure how to register, please contact me at extension 2506 or at christina.trombley@drake.edu.

—Christina Trombley, Online Programming

Strategic Updates Archive

Your guide to Drake’s re-energized brand

An updated Drake University Brand Style Guide is now available on the University Communications website. This useful resource, developed in partnership with branding firm 160over90, provides an overview of the refreshed brand platform, including:

  • Brand strategy
  • Key messages
  • Brand voice and tone
  • Design elements and examples—colors, fonts, logo usage, photography, and more

Consider the updated guide simply an introduction for now. You should not try to implement any elements of the new brand platform on your own and certainly not without first contacting University Communications. Priorities across the University have already been identified, and the rollout will happen sequentially over the coming months.

Conversion to the new brand platform has already begun, and with a focus on printed and digital tools for Admission and student recruitment. University Communications has also met with teams from each college and school to begin exploring how the new brand platform will translate to each academic unit during spring semester. Once the brand vision for each academic unit is set, University Communications will work with other units across campus on migration to the new brand platform throughout the remainder of 2018.

Please know that often-used communications and marekting tools, such as email headers and PowerPoint templates, will be moved to the new platform as soon as possible. Look to OnCampus for updates as new resources become available.

If you have questions about the branding initiative, please refer to this FAQ or contact Dave Remund, executive director of University Communications, at dave.remund@drake.edu. Thank you for your patience as we all work together to better tell the Drake story.

Dave Remund, University Communications

For Students Archive

Hiring service-learning ambassador

The Office of Community Engaged Learning is recruiting a Drake student to be a paid service-learning ambassador for the spring semester. The student will help design and lead an alternative spring break for students, while also performing outreach and service-learning education with international and other students on campus. The position requires a commitment of 6 to 7 hours per week (outside of spring break), and pays $8.25 an hour. Contact Amanda Martin at amanda.martin@drake.edu for more information.

View job description.

—Amanda Martin, Community Engaged Learning