An open forum with Ronald Rogers, the finalist for Academic Innovation & Institutional Effectiveness Vice Provost, was held in the Student Union on Tuesday.

Rogers has been on San Jose State’s staff since 1999, he was the chair of the psychology department from 2011-2016 and taught both graduate and undergraduate courses.

The Q&A-style conversation covered how SJSU can become more accessible to online learners, and how institutional effectiveness can improve the school as a whole.

Rogers said institutional effectiveness is the acknowledgment of whether or not SJSU’s programs are achieving their goals.

“What I’m talking about with institutional effectiveness is, really, how do we know that our programs are doing what they say they are?” Rogers said.

He said since he’s been at SJSU, a “compliance culture” has been built, and he wants to find ways to lessen the importance of number crunching in favor of finding meaningful ways to draw from data.

“But remember, the most important part of that cycle is not the data collection,”  Rogers said. “It’s not the reporting, it’s the reflection about what the data tells you about the health of your class, about the health of your program, about the health of your institution.”

Sarah Schraeder, research associate and program coordinator, said the main focus of his message is to put the betterment of student experiences at the forefront of his actions in his new role. Schraeder also said communication with constituents, such as department chairs, is crucial in the decision-making process.

“There’s a continuous feedback loop happening with that, so that the way you build campus culture and campus buy-in is by not making decisions in a vacuum,” Schraeder said.

Rogers said his affinity for online learning has inspired him to find ways to broaden virtual initiatives.

He said discovering new methods for students not physically on SJSU’s campus to still reap the rewards of on-campus resources is the foundation of strengthening the university’s online presence.

Rogers said while he wants to open up opportunities for online learning, he doesn’t want to undermine chances for students to extend their learning beyond the campus.

“The focus of online is it’s one more pathway to an opportunity, but in doing that we also have to maintain all these other successful pathways as well and successful experiences,” Rogers said. “So it’s not a matter of restricting our opportunities down, I think SJSU Online is [an] example of broadening the opportunities we have to offer.”