Academic Standard and Practices
Minutes
November 10, 2010

Present: Pete Haberman, Taylor Hanna, Laura Horani (chair), Virginia Somes, and Dieterich Steinmetz.

1. We started with #2 on the agenda “Adding a Statement to the Syllabus – Credit Course Overview Standards” (S704) re: the recording and distribution of lectures. I had thought that this would be an easy change, but it took a while to wordsmith because we wanted to add something that was applicable to classes that meet on campus and DL classes and we wanted to cover both lectures and labs. We finally decided on the term “course sessions” as a way to cover all of these ideas. We are proposing adding this statement to the “Additional Content Areas” section: “Statement regarding unauthorized recording of course sessions and distribution of said recordings.” Then someone said, “What about cell phones?” And someone else muttered “and laptops,” so we added “statement regarding cell phones/electronic devices.” These two additions will support those instructors who now currently wonder whether or not they have the right to put statements about these things into their syllabus. Because they are additional, not required, instructors do not need to address these items if they believe they are not an issue in their classrooms.

You know what happens when you look at one part of a policy, right? You end up looking at all of it! L Those of us present really did not like the title of the policy: why use the phrase “credit course overview”? We propose renaming it simply: “Syllabus – Standards for Credit Courses.” Next we looked at the first sentence in S704 and had a discussion about will versus shall. I’m not much for the word shall, but those present felt that it was more appropriate for this type of document. We used the word syllabus rather than the phrase credit course overview, and added the phrase at the first session so that it was clear when faculty should give their students a syllabus. Now the first sentence will read: Each instructor shall distribute a syllabus to students at the first session and to the appropriate administrator’s office during the first week of the course. Then we looked at the third sentence: “Therefore, clarity and specificity are especially important to keep in mind.” The phrase “keep in mind” bothered us as it really doesn’t require any action on the part of the faculty. We changed it to: Clarity and specificity are especially important.  In the next sentence, we changed syllabus to syllabi and made everything else following plural: Instructors should feel free to personalize their syllabi as they set the tone for their classes. We looked at the list following the introductory sentences and realized the heading “Required Content Areas” had somehow gotten dropped off, so we added it back in.  Then we noticed that the point about the Instructional ADA statement had outdated language in it (OSD versus Disability Services), so we made changes to that bullet point. Update: I checked the link this bullet point refers to, and it’s still good. What’s next? Laura will present this to the EAC on Wednesday, November 17^th for approval. I’m hoping they will vote and approve our changes.

2. Next we continued our work on the EAC By-laws. Loretta Goldy (Chair of the Membership Committee) had sent us her remarks on the 10-23-2009 draft of the by-laws, and we started by reviewing them. In II. Membership, we looked at the phrase “continuous appointment full-time faculty.” We thought it was a little redundant, but also felt that it didn’t reflect those situations in which someone doing a job share might want to be part of the EAC or continue being part of the EAC. It was decided that the phrase continuous appointment faculty would be better in II. Membership. Next, we looked at #3 in the membership area. We felt that the word “permanent” was not needed. Members serve two consecutive terms, period. In #4, we thought about re-wording it by taking out temporary as Loretta suggested and adding “to serve out the balance of the member’s term” after the word “replacement”: If a member resigns leaving two quarters or more to be served, the Membership Committee shall appoint a replacement to serve out the balance of the member’s term with confirmation of the full EAC and the District President. However, this is so wordy and many of the ideas are already represented elsewhere in this document: see #6 under “Membership.” Instead, we decided to try this: If a member resigns, leaving less than six months to be served, the position may be left vacant for the remainder of the year. The use of the word may shows that if the Membership Committee wanted to, they could fill the vacancy. Next, in the section about the EAC Chair election, we considered Loretta’s suggestion of moving the process of electing the EAC Chair back from March-May to February-April. Her rationale of the EAC Chair perhaps needing to elect new Standing Committee chairs made sense to us. We also added the phrase by the Membership Committee to C.  This section now looks like this:

B.  In February of each year, the Membership Committee shall issue an invitation for EAC

      Chair nominations to all full-time faculty via email.

C.  At the EAC Meeting in March, the nominees for EAC Chair shall be introduced by the

      Membership Committee and provided an opportunity to make a statement regarding their

      qualifications.

D.  At the EAC Meeting in April, voting members of the EAC shall elect the EAC Chair for

      the following academic year.

E.  If a voting member is elected Chair, s/he must give up his/her voting membership. 

When we started to work on the EAC Leaders Compensation piece, we realized that in trying to insert it into another section that it really needed its own section. That’s when we also decided to re-arrange the sections so that the information would flow more logically:  after #2 Membership came #3 Meetings, #4 Standing Rules, #5 EAC Chair Elections, #6 Standing Committees, #7 EAC Leaders Compensation and #8 Taskforces. Each Standing Committee chair had given me their release time, so we just put one sentence under #7 EAC Leaders Compensation:

The EAC Chair and standing committee chairs shall be given release time at 50% for the EAC Chair, 33% for the Curriculum Committee Chair, 25% each for the Student Development Committee Chair, the Degrees and Certificates Committee Chair, and the ASAP Committee Chair, and 10% for the Membership Committee Chair.

We went through the rest of the document checking for pronoun reference and changing will to shall. What’s next? Laura will present the EAC by-laws to the EAC on Wednesday, November 17^th for discussion (there have been a lot of changes, so I think the by-laws will need to be discussed).

3. Next we talked a bit about the results of the faculty query on D grades. Laura will try a link to Survey Monkey next time and will experiment with putting the email addresses for all of the faculty and AP lists into the BCC area (that is a nifty trick). However, there was some value to seeing so many responses over email although we could have done without the ones who said “Let’s just give As.” 157 responded seriously to this topic: 13% said yes, let’s eliminate Ds; 80% said no, let’s keep the Ds; and 7% responded more philosophically. Laura shared an email response from Rebecca Mathern which said “the Dept of Ed might be changing their tune on this issue so while it’s still important, it might not have the financial aid impact we thought it did last month. We are still waiting to hear the final word on this.” Well, that is a relief, but I don’t know how helpful that will be this term when faculty is determining final grades. I was recently contacted by an advisor at Rock Creek to discuss this issue. She asked me about the D grade and seemed to advocate that we not give them right now to students on financial aid. I have notified the faculty in my department about this and will remind them again before final grades are due.

This is when we started discussing how information is disseminated to the faculty and to the DL office; afterall, what good is a policy that no one is aware of? Dieterich wondered whether there could be an EAC educational push. Taylor reminded us that implementation is not a charge of the ASAP committee. Department chairs and division deans were mentioned as possible people to remind faculty about policy changes and new policy. Many questions chairs and deans get can be answered by policy. Kendra Cawley’s name was also mentioned as someone who could make faculty aware of these policies since she is in charge of implementation. Other logical places to include this information are: the New Faculty Institute, PT faculty inservices, and the Faculty Dept. Chair Institutes (a general session on new policies/changed policies and how to share this information). Perhaps the ASAP Committee needs to write a policy that discusses annualized training (when the academic handbook, especially anything new or any changes made to it, is reviewed and discussed with faculty).

Meeting was adjourned at 5:10 pm.

*Next month we will meet on Friday, December 3^rd 2-4 pm at CLIMB. I hope we can hear from Veronica then about the language change for GPA Calculation/Recalculation.