CHAMPAIGN,Ill. - The College of Education at the University of Illinois recently announced a restructuring that is expected to better support collaborative research and teaching by merging three departments. The merger also is expected to help the college maximize resources, be more competitive in obtaining external funding and address high-impact research and policy initiatives on the state and national levels. The restructuring, which took effect Jan. 1, created a department - called Education Policy, Organization and Leadership - from the former departments of educational policy studies, educational organization and leadership, and human resource education.
EPOL comprises 30 faculty members, 380 on-campus graduate students and nine online programs. James D. Anderson, the head of the former department of educational policy studies who also holds appointments in the department of history and the African Studies Program, heads the new unit.
According to Mary Kalantzis, the dean of the college, combining the departments into one "powerhouse department" is about "synergy" and not about cutting costs, even though the merger will enable units to share resources as well as eliminate some structural impediments to interdepartmental teaching and research.
"The world needs a much more multi-disciplinary approach to the variety of problems than we had addressed separately under the previous configuration," Kalantzis said.
"And we need to address diversity issues much more powerfully across all scholarly domains. Most of our specialist expertise in issues of diversity was located in one department. Now that is available to all the students and scholars in this new entity."
The College of Education started exploring new synergies and how to best configure the resources during the fall 2008 semester, when Kalantzis asked an interdepartmental faculty task force to explore options that would help the college more effectively meet students' needs, community expectations and faculty members' aspirations. The task force recommended reconfiguring the three departments, which have faculty members with intersecting curricula and research interests. A merger would strengthen faculty capacity in shared specializations, enrich students' educational experience and create an infrastructure that would foster collaborative work on funded research and state and national educational policy and practice, the task force suggested.
"I am delighted they've chosen to come together in this way," Kalantzis said. "It gives them a very powerful base for solving the kinds of problems that seem to endure in education contexts."
All program areas within the College of Education are regularly ranked among the top 20 programs in the nation by U.S. News & World Report, and the college has numerous faculty members who are nationally recognized in their disciplines. The new department brings together in one unit prominent senior scholars such as Anderson, Debra Bragg, Stanley Ikenberry and William Trent, and talented young scholars such as Lorenzo Baber, Tim Cain and Jennifer Delaney, who are experts in higher education and access issues. EPOL also includes faculty experts in fields such as human resource development, education reform, ubiquitous learning and global studies in education.
Cain, who studies the history of higher education, said that the merger offers exciting opportunities for Illinois faculty to explore the future of higher education. "Our department is going to be somewhat unique in, for example, the combination of approaches that we can bring to the study of higher education.
"We are bringing together scholars from a variety of different disciplines and
fields - including sociology, history, philosophy, policy - to ask important questions about where higher education should be focusing its efforts; about what it means for students and society to be supporting, attending and participating in higher education, and where that needs to go as we look forward."
Cain added that the merger encourages faculty to rethink how students are educated and how solutions to educational problems are pursued.
The restructuring also offers opportunities for the college to enhance its
distance-learning programs, Kalantzis said. The college offered its first online course as part of a full degree program in 1998, and last fiscal year enrolled 457 students in its online and off-campus programs, mostly in the Chicago area, generating $2.9 million in tuition, according to Scott D. Johnson, chief information officer and associate dean and director of international programs in the college.
By contrast, total on-campus enrollment in the college last year was 1,430 students.
"The potential for the university to do something really first-class in online education - particularly after the derailment of the Global Campus Initiative - is really important for the future," Kalantzis said. "The college has shown that it is possible to do it and have really top-quality programs and very high quality outcomes. Scott and his team have been helping the colleges of liberal arts and sciences, engineering, and other colleges across the university who want to move into this area, and it will be really wonderful when we're the smallest online unit and the others grow."
The three departments shared the third floor of the Education Building on South Sixth Street in Champaign, but even before the departmental merger, staff members in the three departments had identified a need for structural change and voluntarily reorganized their workload and workspace to "offer a superior set of services to faculty," Kalantzis said. "It's remarkable the staff took the initiative first and modeled what was possible. The faculty followed, demonstrating the creativity that can emerge at the level of scholarship."
The college spent about $30,000 remodeling the three departmental offices into a single main office, outfitting a workroom to provide support for its online programs and converting an office into a conference/meeting room.
The College of Education has nearly 41,000 alumni.
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