UMBC Athletics and the broader campus community are deeply saddened by the passing of retired UMBC Swimming and Diving Coach Chad Cradock ‘97. We know this is an especially difficult time for his family and our swimming and diving community, and we extend our heartfelt condolences.

Chad came to UMBC as a student athlete in 1993 and earned his undergraduate degree in psychology while swimming for the Retrievers. After graduating in 1997, he became an assistant swimming and diving coach and was appointed head coach in 2001. 

The Retriever swimming and diving teams have dominated America East Conference competition during their time in the league. The women's squad has captured four of the past six titles, including a resounding victory in 2019. The men’s team has earned 12 of the 13 America East Championships overall and three in a row since the conference reinstituted men’s swimming and diving as a championship sport in the winter of 2018. 

We have met with our student athletes and provided them with crisis support and counseling resources. They are also spending time together in the pool and staying connected as a team. We can all be proud of their resilience and commitment to each other through this challenging time.

Students in need of grief counseling or emotional support can contact the Counseling Center at 410-455-2472 on weekdays, 8:30 a.m. – 5 p.m., or the after-hours support line at 410-455-3230.  Employees can access support through the Employee Assistance Program.

As we learn more about the family’s plans for remembering Chad, we will communicate them to you. In the meantime, personal expressions of sympathy may be sent to Christie Cradock at 1412 Macfree Court, Odenton, MD 21113.

Brian Barrio, Director of Athletics

Key Points

• Spring break is March 14-21.

• Residence halls will remain open during break.

• Travel by any community member is strongly discouraged.

• All community members approved to be on campus must continue to symptom track.

Dear UMBC Community,

As we approach Spring Break, March 14 ﹘ 21, we want to remind our community of the essential health and safety precautions we will need to incorporate into our spring break plans.  While UMBC has continued to maintain a positivity rate that is substantially lower than surrounding communities, minimizing your exposure and risk over the break will be an essential part of our ability to continue our plans for the remainder of the semester.

Faculty, staff, and students who are approved to be on campus have already received detailed instructions for the break. Current residential students are strongly encouraged to remain on campus during the break and those that stay on campus must continue to test. All other community members approved to be on campus should pause their regular testing schedule, unless they come to campus for work or research during that week. Please do not visit campus during the break unless it is required. All community members approved to be on campus must continue daily online symptom tracking 7 days a week throughout the entire break in order to remain in compliance.

In addition to on-campus safety measures, please keep in mind that travel restrictions remain in place in Maryland and we strongly discourage any travel, particularly traveling outside of the state. We also ask that you continue to follow state restrictions and not participate in large gatherings and limit your exposure in public places and other high risk situations. Please continue to practice physical distancing, mask wearing, and frequent hand washing. 

This has been a challenging year and many people are experiencing fatigue and frustration at the continued isolation and physical distancing required of us during this pandemic. We know that this has been a sacrifice and we appreciate all that you have done and continue to do to keep yourselves, your families, and our community safe. We hope that you find a way to relax and recharge over break and we look forward to connecting with you after the break. 

Provost Philip Rous

Vice President for Administration and Finance Lynne Schaefer

COVID-19 Planning Coordinating Committee Co-Chairs

Mathematics is a powerful tool.  We use applications from math all day, every day, like when we drive over a bridge or look at our email.  

Math is very difficult for many people, and they struggle with it.  Many students at our university (and almost all others) need to repeat a math class to progress in their program and complete their degrees.

Our research has uncovered some important facts:

• Many students repeating math classes often must do so more than one time, which extends their time to degree and could prevent them from graduating.  

• Students who use the Math and Science Tutoring Center improve their chances of passing their math courses.

• The positive effect from math tutoring is especially large for students who are repeating a course.  “Repeaters” increase their chances of success by roughly 15 to 20 percentage points!

• But, we found, only about 10 percent of students repeating math were going to tutoring

The Data Science Team, supported by DoIT and the Provost's Office, designed a pilot program in conjunction with the Math Department to “nudge” students repeating 100-level math courses to use tutoring.  

A nudge is a message designed to provide information to many people at very low cost that changes behavior over time.  An example of a nudge you see in everyday life is the roadside sign that says “Click it or ticket.”  Our nudges let students know not just that tutoring is effective, but also how effective it is.

This semester (Spring 2021) we sent nudges to 114 students using a myUMBC personal post.  About 70 percent of students receiving the nudge read them, and we have evidence that suggests that the nudge leads to an increased use of math tutoring by roughly 30 percent.  

The pilot is now in its 8th semester.  During that time we’ve nudged over 1800 students repeating their courses.  

In addition to this program, we’re using what we’ve learned about nudges to help students in other ways that support their success, including combining them with predictive analytics for enhanced early alerts.

By Bob Carpenter

Early next week, the week of 3/8/21, the Webex app, formerly Webex Teams, will receive an upgrade enabling all features contained in the Webex meetings app. This change makes for a more simple user experience and means that many campus users will no longer need to run a second Webex Meetings software.

For the last year much of the campus community has needed to run both the Webex Meetings and the Webex (Teams) software in order to have complete functionality for calling, asynchronous communication and in-meeting experiences. In the next week Webex users will be able to upgrade their Webex application to include all in-meeting features previously available only in the Webex Meetings software. This includes in-meeting chat, breakout rooms, emojis, grid views and more.

In this second of a series of updates we’ll give a brief description of Salesforce, UMBC’s goals for the project, and summarize what we’re currently working on and what’s next.

Salesforce is a market-leading Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform.   In higher education, CRMs are used in recruitment, admissions, student success, and alumni relations.  Salesforce is an important tool to help us maintain and grow our enrollment...vital to UMBC’s ability to weather the pandemic and our long term response to changing age-based demographics in our region.

Big news! Salesforce will launch on March 3rd. “Launch” means that all prospective undergraduate student communications and their activities will be collected, analyzed, and maintained in Salesforce making it the system of record for prospective student data.  

The next phase of the project is integrating prospective students’ requests for information, built and tested by our team, into the platform.  Marketing Cloud, a companion product to Salesforce, uses information from these requests from potential students with a personalized journey (experience) and helps admissions staff identify what information might be of most use to them.  

At the same time the team is finalizing the launch, we’re also conducting training and activities to maximize the value of our investment and taking important steps to extend the platforms to the Graduate School and Division of Professional Studies.  

This is a big project with many interconnected tasks. Congratulations to the cross-campus team that has accomplished a great deal in a very short period of time.