Students at Riverland Community College got a chance to give input on and learn about the Charting the Future plan Wednesday afternoon.

Riverland is one of 31 state schools in the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities, or MnSCU, working on a strategic vision to increase efficiency and effectiveness.

Riverland hosted a Charting the Future Spring Gallery Walk on Wednesday in the entrance of the east building at the Austin campus. Riverland President Adenuga Atewologun was excited for the walk as students and staff were able to gain a larger perspective on what the plan entailed.

“This is a great opportunity to demonstrate this collaborative new face of two sides working together,” Atewologun said.

According to the MnSCU website www.mnscu.edu, Charting the Future is a strategic effort to help Minnesota have a prosperous future through three commitments: ensuring access to a good education for all Minnesotans; being the partner of choice to meet Minnesota’s workforce and community needs; and delivering to students, employers, communities and taxpayers the highest value and most affordable higher education option.

The main goal for the program is to help existing schools collaborate to help students meet their education goals and to get input from staff, students and other schools.

“This is an opportunity for the community’s students, staff and faculty to have an input in to the Charting the Future strategic framework,” Atewologun said. “That’s the framework that helps us to see where we can drive the MnSCU institution … for the next decade and beyond, facing the challenges of employment workforce, lifelong planning. We think that we need input to know how to do things differently and how we move the institutions much faster than we currently have.”

Charting the Future hasn’t come without controversy. Just last week, MnSCU faculty and administrators agreed to end a five-month standoff over the plan. Two faculty unions had been in open revolt against Chancellor Steven Rosenstone over his handling of Charting the Future, a fledgling master plan that is supposed to modernize and streamline operations at the sprawling system with 410,000 students on 54 campuses.

The two sides announced March 4 that they “have agreed to move forward cooperatively and collaboratively” in a way that appears to give a bigger role to faculty and students on the planning teams.

Riverland held a similar gallery walk last October in Albert Lea, and Atewologun said they have learned several things since then, one of them the importance of anonymous input.

“We learned that it’s really important when we do this kind of gallery walk, to give people the opportunity to be able to actually give their input anonymously,” Atewologun said.

The previous system allowed everyone to see each-other’s input, which influenced some of the input people were willing to give. To learn more about the plan and what changes it would bring about, visit www.mnscu.edu/chartingthefuture/faq.html.

—Tribune Content Agency LLC contributed to this report.