Bye-bye Bridges! Students at RWU have frequently complained about the learning management software since it was implemented in the early 2010s. The university plans on implementing the alternate learning management software D2L’s Brightspace.

 Brightspace has already been implemented on the Providence campus and is used to organize the University’s Remote extension classes. The university plans on launching the site in the fall of 2025 to a few volunteer professors and hopes to fully implement the software in the spring of’ 26. Due to this staggered change, some students will be required to use both Bridges and Brightspace.

”I know that’s not ideal, but that’s just kind of how this goes when you change from one system to another, to get all of the courses moved over to the new system. So by spring, I expect we’ll be pretty much done”, said Everett. 

Everett hopes that staggering the implementation of Brightspace will allow professors to get comfortable with using all the tools the system has to offer. Met with concerns from the student senate over the current lack of faculty’s knowledge of how to use Bridges, Everett assured the assembly that there would be continued training exercises for Brightspace even after the pilot launch.

Along with the implementation of a new learning management software, the university hopes to train the entire faculty on a new advising software to simplify the advising process. This new system was used this year by a few professors, but has yet to be implemented school wide. Everett recognizes that, although some professors currently use Bridges or other systems of connecting to advisees, having one system that both faculty and professional advisors can use to check in with a student’s progress will hopefully allow greater insight into the advising process for both student and advisor. 

Everett also explained the success that the university has found through having professional advisors dedicated to first-year students.“It’s helped even just to have some of our largest majors be covered by the professional advisors for the first year. I do think we ask a lot of our faculty in terms of advising. It’s important to them, and to their credit, they embrace that model. But it’s been helpful to give them some support”.  As well as taking a load off of the current faculty advisor’s shoulders, the assembly agreed with the academic Affairs chair, Sam Carter, that this push has been a successful initiative. According to Everett, although professional advisors have been in place for a few years and have shown successful results, there was pushback from some of the academic programs who felt that they had a really good advising plan for freshmen and wanted to retain faculty advisors. This has led to a compromise, with some programs having professional advising and some leaving their advising to faculty. Although the university plans on continuing this mixed structure, Everett mentions that the university continues to explore wider implementation. 

With all of the help provided by the university to freshman students, Everett mentions that the university hopes to explore the current sophomore experience and provide more academic support to continue to increase retention. 

 According to Everett, each academic year, there are about 7000 changes to majors on campus, and the university thinks it’s high time to make the ability to make those changes a little bit easier. Along with the other two software implementations, students can expect one more as the university plans on implementing an easier online form for students to declare a double major, minor, or change their major. 

Everett speaks on the university’s push for the design-your-own-major programs and hopes that through the simplification of the major change process, there will be more opportunities for students to take advantage of the program, “We’re still kind of talking about it, but we definitely would like to make it easier and more visible to students that you can design your own major, and we’ve had some real successes recently. All I can say is we continue to talk about that, and that is a priority for us. Both in terms of helping students imagine an academic program that’s really uniquely suited to them”. 

Everett also provided an update to some of the current academic programs following numerous changes. Political science and Anthropology/sociology will now be considered programs under the school of justice as the university hopes that the change in schools will allow for further communication and easier connection between the undergrad and law school. After an assessment of rosters and classes running the philosophy and theater majors are being phased out. Students are still able to take both theatre and philosophy classes as well as taking a philosophy minor, but the majors are no longer offered to incoming students. 

Going into the next academic year, there are a lot of changes to the current major rosters. Everett mentions that the university is attempting to prioritize adding more grad school courses for majors like elementary education, which the school hopes to partner with Fall River schools, or adding an aquaculture certificate that the university hopes blooms into a full aquaculture graduate program. According to Everett, the new real estate minor has been spreading like wildfire, and the university is now considering a full major program for real estate.

Following concern from the assembly over possible cuts to required gen ed DEI classes, Everett assured the senate that the classes aren’t going anywhere. Due in part because classes aren’t prioritizing one group of people over another and the DEI learning outcomes are independent from any DEI initiatives, the diversity requirement doesn’t violate any laws. Everett continued to speak on behalf of the university’s funding about the current administration. Unlike other universities that are experiencing a loss of federal grants, RWU doesn’t get many grants from the National Institute of Health, so the impact to us from federal funding changes has been modest. Within the grants that the university does get, some feature an “overhead” of the grant that is offered by the federal government that has been lowered. This change has affected the campus but not by huge margins. Everett also mentions that although the majority of current funding remains unchanged. The landscape of applying for grants and the grants that are offered have changed under the federal administration, and that effect remains unknown.  

Classroom updates 

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