The development of Our UMBC: A Strategic Plan for Advancing Excellence is founded upon a broadly inclusive process. Discussions about focus areas for planning began at the 2013 University Retreat and continued through a series of 35 conversations with nearly 800 faculty, staff, students, and alumni this past fall. Based on this campus input, the Strategic Planning Steering Committee has identified four planning focus areas widely viewed as drivers of future success for UMBC:

The Student Experience

Primary goal: Create vibrant, exceptional, and comprehensive undergraduate and graduate student experiences that integrate in and out of classroom learning to prepare graduates for meaningful careers and civic and personal lives.

Innovative Curriculum and Pedagogy

Primary Goal: Develop innovative curricula and academic programs that support and enhance the success of our undergraduate and graduate students and prepare them for meaningful careers, lifelong learning, and engaged citizenship; and thereby maintain and enhance our position as a national leader in undergraduate and graduate education.

Collective Impact in Research, Scholarship and Creative Achievement

Primary goal: Elevate UMBC as a nationally recognized and regionally relevant research university. The key drivers in achieving this goal are: creating an inclusive environment for faculty and students, developing excellence in new intellectual frontiers, and fostering multidisciplinary and inter-institutional approaches that build research, scholarship, and creative achievement across the campus.

Community and Extended Connection

Primary goals: 1) Build, nurture, and extend relationships among diverse internal and external communities and partners to enrich campus life, local neighborhoods, the State, and the surrounding region. 2) Foster innovative problem-solving and responsible entrepreneurship through strategic partnerships with alumni, government agencies, businesses, and community-based organizations to create a sustainable and prosperous future for all.

Each focus area will be addressed in depth by a strategy group from March 2014 through April 2015.

Strategy groups will be responsible for engaging campus and external stakeholders in this next stage of planning work.

In addition, a Foundations Work Group will develop recommendations to continue to build the strong foundations necessary for UMBC to grow and thrive. The work group will address people, resources, policies and procedures, facilities, IT, and environmental sustainability. Its work will include reviewing current status, identifying pain points, and proposing opportunities for improvement in these areas.

Senior advisors and consultants will also be available to work with individual strategy groups on more specific matters pertaining to foundational infrastructure.

The strategy group work comes as the campus prepares for 2016 and UMBC’s 50th anniversary, creating a unique opportunity to reflect on accomplishments and challenges while developing strategies to advance excellence at UMBC and support future development of the campus.

STRATEGY GROUP LEADERSHIP

The Student Experience

Co-chaired by Kim Leisey, Associate Vice President, Student Affairs, and Devin Hagerty, Professor, Political Science, and Program Director, Global Studies

Innovative Curriculum and Pedagogy

Co-chaired by Carole McCann, Professor and Chair, Gender and Women’s Studies, and Jeffrey Leips, Associate Professor, Biological Sciences

Collective Impact in Research, Scholarship, and Creative Achievement

Co-chaired by Aryya Gangopadhyay, Professor and Chair, Information Systems, and John Schumacher, Associate Professor, Graduate Program Director, Sociology and Anthropology

Community and Extended Connection

Co-chaired by Steve Bradley, Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director, Visual Arts, and Mavis Sanders, Professor, Education

UNIFORM CHARGES FOR ALL GROUPS

The uniform charges to all groups reflect the Guiding Principles for Planning established at the outset of the planning process by the President’s Council and shared governance leaders.

Consistent with our commitment to inclusion, strategy groups are charged to serve as agents of responsibility, and, in this role, are expected to align the group’s work with current and future interests of the campus community, the State, and the nation. Each strategy group is charged to:

• Identify stakeholders in the focus area and analyze stakeholder interests and influence;

• Incorporate information analysis into the process, including environmental scans and analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats related to the focus area;

• Engage all stakeholders in interactive and continuous communications about the focus area and the strategy group’s work;

• Define excellence as it relates to the focus area;

• Align strategies with UMBC’s mission, vision, and values;

• Align strategies with USM, State, and national priorities, as well as global opportunities;

• Be forward-thinking and creative in developing strategies for UMBC in the focus area;

• Identify infrastructure for successful and sustainable implementation of strategies for this area: people, resources, policies, procedures, technology, facilities, and campus commitment to environmental sustainability;

• Identify opportunities for partnerships that can advance strategies in the focus area, drawing on campus, USM, and broader community assets and relationships;

• Identify opportunities for external support in the focus area;

• Consider potential impact of strategies on UMBC’s visibility and reputation.

SPECIFIC RESEARCH QUESTIONS FOR EACH GROUP

The Student Experience

• What roles do safety, sense of community and belonging, and campus pride play in students’ experiences?

• What are the student experiences that influence preparation for the lifespan and the careers of undergraduate and graduate students? What roles do civic agency, academic support, health, and fitness play in this preparation?

• What is the current compositional diversity of UMBC? What is the impact of UMBC’s  compositional diversity and multiculturalism on undergraduate and graduate student experiences?

• What are the experiences that influence students’ learning about culture and preparation for participation in global citizenship?

• What are the experiences of undergraduate and graduate students with interactions, delivery of service and care of campus offices, units, departments, faculty, and staff?

• How does faculty and staff infrastructure impact student experiences?

Innovative Curriculum and Pedagogy

• How does the current profile of our faculty, students, and mix of programs compare with our aspirational peers, and how does this profile align with the University’s mission? What approaches used by peers might UMBC adopt to strike an appropriate balance between in- and out-of-state students, the distribution of students among programs, and demographic characteristics such as gender and socio-economic status to better align our student profile with the University’s mission in the future?

• What are the lessons learned from studies of retention and graduation rates at UMBC and elsewhere, and how can this information guide us to increase student success by
developing innovative programs, curricula, classroom practices, and instructional modes at the undergraduate and graduate levels?

• What measures of success for students have we used in addition to retention and graduation rates? What should we use as the critical measures of academic success? How can we use assessment of these critical measures to support continuous improvement of student learning outcomes at UMBC?

• What are the current best practices in innovative curriculum and pedagogy at our peer institutions and nationally? How have UMBC programs leveraged resources, partnerships, technology, and innovations to enhance student learning? What additions would be needed
to significantly improve student learning and how should they be prioritized? What specific opportunities and challenges related to classrooms, infrastructure, technology support, and faculty development exist to support curricular and pedagogical innovations and partnerships across the curriculum?

• Drawing on national best practices, how can UMBC balance supporting existing academic programs and the development of new programs? What metrics can we use to track whether we have achieved the appropriate balance as well as the best mix of academic fields and degree levels/options?

• Drawing on national best practices, what is the appropriate balance between supporting the instructional duties of the faculty in: 1) areas of existing strength, 2) areas that need strengthening, and 3) areas of academic innovation? How can new support and the reallocation/redesign of existing support be used to enhance classroom infrastructure, technology, and faculty development in all three areas? What best practices in faculty reward and recognition, including P&T and prestigious awards, can UMBC utilize to support high quality teaching and encourage curricular and pedagogical innovation?

Research, Scholarship, and Creative Achievement

• What are UMBC’s current strengths in research, scholarship, and creative activities and the potential areas of growth?

• What are the selected areas of research, scholarship, and creative activities that with targeted investment will elevate UMBC’s national prominence in the next five years?

• How do we utilize and extend our connections with local communities and regional assets to build on our strengths in research, scholarship, and creative achievement?

• How do we promote, sustain, and grow multi-disciplinary and inter-institutional initiatives to maximize collective impact of our research, scholarship, and creative activities?

• What priorities and metrics should be used to track progress and success in our goal to enhance UMBC’s research, scholarship, and creative activities?

• What resources are needed to attain our goals in research, scholarship, and creative activities?

Community and Extended Connection

• How can UMBC build upon and maximize our growing and evolving campus, community, and regional partnerships that foster economic and cultural growth? Specifically, how can UMBC build upon the success of campus centers and academic and co-curricular initiatives that have fostered relationships off campus with alumni, community partners, and cultural organizations? What are the weaknesses within these initiatives that could be strengthened?

• How can UMBC develop research and educational partnerships with government agencies at the federal, State, and local levels to retain and expand existing businesses and to support the development of new ones that stimulate innovation and economic growth?

• How can UMBC better encourage, motivate, build the capacity of, and reward faculty, staff, and students for their facilitation and leadership of extended connections and partnerships?

• How can UMBC be a more effective partner with economically underserved communities to solve complex social and environmental problems?

• How can UMBC more effectively communicate contributions, successes, and achievements that benefit the region to on-campus and off-campus audiences (e.g., alumni, current and future students, government officials, community partners, and businesses)?

• What are the best practices for fostering, developing, and sustaining productive partnerships on and off campus that peer universities have employed, and from which we might learn?

• What personnel, technology, and other resources are necessary to create a campus-wide system to record and track partnerships and engagement with the community, as well as evaluate their effectiveness and impact for diverse constituencies (e.g., faculty, students, community partners, surrounding neighborhoods, the state, and the region)?

STRATEGY GROUP DELIVERABLES

Strategy group work plan: Due April 14, 2014

Mid-point written report: Due June 30, 2014

• Summary of stakeholder analysis

• Stakeholder engagement plan

• Environmental scan highlights

• Proposed discussion questions for focus at University Retreat

Final recommendations: Due April 15, 2015

• High-level summary of most important information analysis findings for the focus area

• Concise narrative responding to uniform charge elements and research questions

• Recommendations
Strategic goals – bold, aspirational ideas that inspire the next level of success in focus area.

  Strategic objectives – means of achieving or moving toward strategic goals.

  Resources – realistic plan to address objectives.

  Practices and policies – organizational changes needed to address objectives.

  Metrics – specific performance targets and timelines providing measurable outcomes information

STRATEGY GROUP SUPPORT

• Information analysis support will be provided by the Office of Institutional Research, Analysis and Decision Support.

• Campus community and stakeholder engagement support will be provided by the Office of Institutional Advancement.

• Meeting scheduling support will be provided by the Division of Academic Affairs.

• Each group will be matched with a volunteer recorder.

HTML imports is an exciting technology that promises to change how we build websites. Imports allow you to include HTML documents within other HTML documents. This has a number of benefits, including the ability to create a bundle of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code that can be shared within your application, or even with other applications on the web. Whilst it’s possible to achieve this using AJAX, HTML imports provide a much cleaner way to load self-contained components into your web pages.

In this blog post, you’re going to learn how to use HTML imports in your projects. You’ll also learn how to combine HTML imports with the power of the <template> element to create dynamic web pages.

Let’s get started!

Using HTML Imports

For starters, you should know that browser support for HTML imports is still pretty limited. Google Chrome has had support since version 31, but you still need to enable the feature manually.

To enable HTML imports in Chrome, go to chrome://flags and enable the Enable HTML Imports flag. Once you’re done, click the Relaunch Now button at the bottom of the screen to restart Chrome with support for HTML imports.

Now that you’re browser is all set up, let’s take a look at how you use imports within your web pages.

HTML imports use the <link> element to reference the file that you wish to import; this works in a similar way to how you include stylesheets. Make sure that you set the rel attribute to import to indicate to the browser that the referenced file should be imported into the document.

<head>
        <link rel="import" href="/path/to/template.html">
    </head>

Note: HTML imports adhere to the same-origin policy for security reasons. Therefore, if you wish to import an HTML document from an external domain, you need to make sure you have CORS set up correctly.

As I mentioned earlier, HTML imports are great for bundling up other resources that are needed by your application. In the example below, the imported HTML file contains a number of <link> and <script> elements that are responsible for setting the base styling and functionality for an application.

<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/normalize.css">
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/grid.css">
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/alerts.css">    
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/buttons.css">        
    <script src="js/jquery.js"></script>
    <script src="js/app.js"></script>

Importing this file into an HTML document would cause the browser to load each of these CSS and JavaScript files and then apply them to the main document.

Using Templates with HTML Imports

Now that you understand the basics of how HTML imports work, let’s take a look at how you can use this technology in tandem with the <template> element (also part of the Web Components gang) to load dynamic content into your web pages.

The first thing to know is that HTML imports don’t work like PHP includes. The HTML markup within the imported file won’t be automatically stamped out wherever you placed the <link> element. Instead, the imported HTML file (known as the import document) is loaded by the browser and stored behind the scenes and ready for you to use. You can then add the contents of the import document to your web page using JavaScript.

Note: This rule only applies to HTML content. Any CSS or JavaScript code will be loaded by the browser and applied the main document automatically.

You can access the contents of the import document by examining the import property of the corresponding <link> element.

var content = document.getElementById('myLinkElement').import;

Let’s say that we’re building a blog and want to have a page that displays a list of the most recent posts. We could create a template that is responsible for displaying the titles and snippets for each of the blog posts and store this template in a separate HTML file.

<template id="blog-post">
        <div class="post">
            <h2 class="post-title"><a href=""></a></h2>
            <p class="post-snippet"></p>
        </div>
    </template>

Here we’ve created a simple HTML template with an <h2> for the post title and a <p> for the post snippet.

Next we need to import this file into the main document.

<head>
        <link rel="import" href="templates.html" id="templates">
    </head>

Here we’ve added a simple <link> element to the <head> of our main document that references the HTML file containing the template (templates.html). We’ve also added an id attribute to the tag that will help us to reference the element using JavaScript.

Now we need to add an element to the main document that will contain the list of blog posts.

<div id="blog-posts"></div>

Next up, we need to create some dummy data for the blog posts that will be displayed in the list. To keep things simple, we’re just going to add an array of JavaScript objects directly to the main HTML file, but you could also load this data via AJAX.

<script>
      var blogPosts = [
        {
          "title": "Exploring the JavaScript Device APIs",
          "snippet": "The mobile revolution has completely changed how people access the web. It’s only natural then that the web should evolve to better suit the plethora of devices on which it’s now accessed.",
          "url": "http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/exploring-javascript-device-apis"
        },
        {
          "title": "Gamepad Controls for HTML5 Games",
          "snippet": "HTML5 games still have a lot of promises to fulfil, but the W3C gamepad specification is a great example of something that’s going well.",
          "url": "http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/gamepad-controls-html5-games"
        },
        {
          "title": "‘It Is Never Too Late’: How a Teacher and an Artist Switched to Web Careers in Midstream",
          "snippet": "The “breaking moment” in Jon Liu’s teaching career came at 7 o’clock in the morning.",
          "url": "http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/never-late-teacher-artist-switched-web-careers-midstream"
        }
      ];
    
      // TODO: Add the rest of the code here...
    </script>

This data structure contains titles, snippets, and URLs for three separate blog posts.

Now it’s time to write the code that’s responsible to stamping out the blog post template.

First of all, you need to get the <link> element that references the imported HTML file and store it in a variable called templatesImport.

// Get the link element that references the templates.html file.
    var templatesImport = document.getElementById('templates');

You can then access the import property on this variable to get the contents of the import document. Store this in a variable called templates.

// Retrieve the loaded templates.
    var templates = templatesImport.import

Next, you need to find the <template> element within the HTML stored in the templates variable. You can do this using the getElementById method, passing in the id we gave the template (blog-post).

// Get the template.
    var template = templates.getElementById('blog-post');

Now you’re ready to start stamping out the template for each of the blog posts.

You first need to create a for loop that will iterate over the list of blog posts.

// Repeat for each of the posts.
    for (i in blogPosts) {
        // Get the current post.
        var post = blogPosts[i];
    
        // TODO: The rest of the code goes here...
    }

The for..in structure used here will pass a variable, i, to the code block, which represents the current index within the blogPosts array. You then use this index to fetch the corresponding object from the blogPosts array and store this in a variable called post.

Next up you need to create a clone of the template’s content. To do this you use the document.importNode method, passing in the content of the template.

// Clone the template content.
    var clone = document.importNode(template.content, true);

The boolean parameter (set here to true) specifies that the browser should also clone any descendent nodes within the template.

Now you need to apply the blog post data to the cloned template. You can do this by updating the innerText and href properties of the enclosed elements.

// Apply the blog post data to the template.
    clone.querySelector('.post-title a').innerText = post['title'];
    clone.querySelector('.post-title a').href = post['url'];
    clone.querySelector('.post-snippet').innerText = post['snippet'];

The final step is to add the populated template to the list of blog posts in the main document. Remember that we gave this element the ID blog-posts.

// Add the blog post to the page.
    document.getElementById('blog-posts').appendChild(clone);

That’s it! You now know how to use HTML imports and templates to create dynamic web pages.

For the remainder of this post you’re going to learn about import events and how to check that the user’s browser supports HTML imports.

Import Events

The <link> element has two events, onload and onerror, that can be used to monitor the loading status of your HTML imports. Attaching functions to these events allows you to execute code once the import file has been loaded, or to recover from any errors. At the moment, it’s best to do this using the onload and onerror attributes.

<script>
        // Handle Loaded Templates.
        function templatesLoaded(event) {
          console.log('Templates loaded.');
        }
    
        // Handle Errors.
        function templatesFailed(event) {
          console.log('Templates could not be loaded.');
        }
    </script>
    
    <link id="templates" rel="import" href="templates.html" onload="templatesLoaded(event)" onerror="templatesFailed(event)">

The browser will load the import file as soon as it encounters the <link>, so you need to make sure that your success and error handlers have been defined before the <link> element in your markup.

Note: This is one of the few occasions when using event attributes like onload and onerror is considered OK. Generally, you will want to take an unobtrusive approach to JavaScript when building your web applications.

Testing for Browser Support

You can check to see if the user’s browser supports HTML imports by looking for the import property on the <link> element.

if ('import' in document.createElement('link')) {
        // HTML imports are supported!
    } else {
        // HTML imports are not supported.
    }

The Polymer team has developed a great polyfill that adds support for HTML imports to other web browsers.

Final Thoughts

Just as containers revolutionised the shipping industry, the ability to share bundles of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS code in a form that is widely accepted is going to completely change how we approach frontend web development.

What are your thoughts on HTML imports and Web Components as a whole? Is this something you’re excited about or would you rather stick to a more traditional setup? Share your views in the comments.

Useful Links

• W3C HTML Imports Specification
• Polymer HTML Imports Polyfill
• HTML Imports: #include for the web

The post An Introduction to HTML Imports appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

I chatted with Jen Simmons about flexbox and the general future of the web.

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