I think we do a good job forming relationships with students and tending to their needs. In the past week, I've heard at least three students' prayer concerns and have prayed for them. I think our advising process is set up to be fairly robust.
One area of growth on this front: how can we practice more fairness to residential and distance students alike? I feel like distance students often get the short end of the stick when it comes to our time. Because residential classes have fewer students, I spend a disproportionate amount of time with residential students compared with distance students. Additionally, we have a lot of extracurricular support for residential students like worship and tables (not to mention the on campus health center). I don't think we've figured out how to make that fair among all of our student body, even after doing distance ed for more than 15 years. Part of the problem for me is I'm United Methodist, and our UM students are all residential. And I'm not advocating taking on more work because I think we all feel like our plates are very full. But I think we could do a better job taking inventories of how our time is divided among our students and making sure we're being fair to distance students--especially when they're the whole reason we're staying afloat.