- Strategic Goal 1: Curriculum
- Strategic Goal 2: Recruitment and Retention
- Strategic Goal 3: Facilities / Resources
- Strategic Goal 4: Faculty Development
- Strategic Goal 5: Faculty Activity
- Strategic Goals Schema
Strategic Goal 1: Curriculum
We will adapt and revise existing courses, design and develop new courses, and pursue cross-listed / team-taught courses with other departments with complimentary strengths to better the quality of our undergraduate program. In doing so, we will actively tune our current programs, as well as design new programs (GAME option, software engineering) to meet the needs of our students as well as develop them into technically savvy, competitive employees for a global market place. We are confident that the availability of a good technical workforce will help attract more knowledge-based industries to the state. We will focus on designing majors and options within our department that stimulate and engage all students but additionally help attract stronger and better-prepared students to pursue their academic and career dreams at our campus. We will pursue activities that will help us reach out to teachers from our supporting school districts and other community supporters through targeted, state-of-the-art summer certificate programs. Back to Top
Strategic Goal 2: Recruitment and Retention
We will work diligently to improve our program and better prepare students for their future jobs. We will target 1.5X our current SCH production by the Fall 2008 semester and 2X SCH production by Fall 2010. To support these goals, we will collaboratively pursue unique, technically strong, and appropriately distinguished programs. We will proactively work to develop new options and majors in cooperation with other disciplines to meet our student, employer and community stakeholder needs. To assist in our efforts, we will focus on recruitment, retention and mentoring activities to help attract and retain good students in the program. Screening / placement tests to help students’ understand their strengths and weaknesses will be explored. This may additionally help us understand correlations between retention and initial placement. Back to Top
Strategic Goal 3: Facilities / Resources
We will pursue the development of department-based as well as interdisciplinary research laboratories to support our faculty research activities. We will also correspondingly augment our teaching–focused laboratories to help in our interaction with the community as well as meeting the educational needs of students enrolled in our programs. As our program grows over the next few years, we will seek the necessary support from the administration to address the need for additional faculty and staff positions in support of the teaching and research needs within the department. Back to Top
Strategic Goal 4: Faculty Development
We will seek to strengthen research in the three focused areas mentioned above. We will undertake short-term activities (1-3 years) that seek to establish the following two centers. In the longer term (4-6 years), as the Bioinformatics Ph.D. program evolves and as we establish a Ph.D program for the department, we will appropriately complement these two efforts by pushing forward with a third research center. The exact area for this focus will be decided by Fall 2008, as we reflect and review the success of our short-term goals.
- Center for Research on Knowledge-driven Enterprises for Scalable, Resilient Infrastructures (KESRI): This center will leverage existing strengths across the UALR campus, and grow our faculty interests in parallel and distributed computing, disaster engineering, modeling and simulation, scaleable enterprise application design, development and deployment.
- NSA Center for Excellence for Assurance, Security and Software Usability Research and Education (ASSURE): This center will also leverage existing strengths across the UALR campus, and grow our faculty research and education interests in the areas of networked systems, software engineering, security, protocol design and verification and information assurance. Back to Top
Strategic Goal 5: Faculty Activity
Simultaneously, on an ongoing basis, we will seek to increase the numbers of quality publications by faculty, increase the number and value of externally funded research activities, and stimulate professional activities to improve our program’s visibility, both nationally and internationally. Faculty members will be encouraged to explore new research, thereby aiding to reenergize research efforts within the department. Back to Top
