Meeting Minutes for November 4, 2016
Minutes
The Academic Senate Committee on Academic Development/Elective Academic Programs met on November 4th, 2016, at 4:00 pm in L-314
Committee Members in Attendance:
Tirandai Hemraj-Benny (Chairperson); Mirna Lekic (Faculty); Vazgen Shekoyan (Faculty); Yusuf Gurtas (Faculty); Nicole Lopez-Jantzen (Faculty); Neera Mohess (Faculty)
Liaisons in Attendance:
Business:
The meeting was called to order at 4:00 pm
1. The chairperson began the meeting by sharing the minutes from previous meetings and the agenda for today’s meeting. The agenda included the following: a) approval of minutes from meetings held on 9/7 and 10/5, b) promoting the fall workshop on conference presentation skills c) confirming the dates for spring workshops, and d) discussing student evaluations of faculty
2. Minutes for 9/7/16 and 10/5/16 meetings were approved.
3. Dr. Landy informed the committee that the information about our December 2nd workshop (on Conference Presentation Skills) will be posted on the CETL website. The committee will also send this information to be included in the Campus Events email, and will ask Dr. Van Der Horn-Gibson to include the location of the workshop on the flyer she provided. Dr. Hemraj-Benny asked the committee members to then share the flyer within their respective departments.
4. Spring workshops to be offered in collaboration with CETL were discussed:
a) The committee agreed that the workshop on Conference Presentation Skills would be repeated on a Wednesday or Friday in March (12-2pm). The date would be determined according to Dr. Van Der Horn-Gibson’s and other facilitators’ availability that month.
b) The committee agreed that the second workshop (Structuring Feedback to Improve Student Writing) would be offered twice: on Wednesday, February 15th and Friday, February 17th, 2017, 12-2pm.
c) There was a discussion on the format of the second workshop, and the committee thought that having a roundtable discussion titled “Sharing Best Practices” would be a good way to organize it. The committee also discussed inviting a member of the Writing Intensive program to join the roundtable. In the end, the chairperson asked the Subcommittee on Events (Berry, Lekic, Van Der Horn-Gibson) to propose the structure for this workshop (to be approved at the next meeting).
d) The committee agreed to present one workshop on Detecting and Avoiding Plagiarism either on Wednesday, February 22th or Friday, February 24, 2017. Prof. Mohess agreed to find a librarian who would lead this workshop. She also suggested contacting an ACC specialist who could contribute to the workshop.
e). It was agreed that the committee members would be active participants in these workshops (sharing rubrics, useful experiences, suggesting speakers, etc.), and that a few members of the committee would be present at each event.
5. A discussion on improving the current student evaluations of faculty forms followed.
Committee commented on the sample evaluations provided by Dr. Berry. Dr. Hemraj-Benny asked the committee to consider the following:
1. How would faculty feel about giving up more class time for longer evaluations?
2. Do we agree that online evaluations are not a realistic option?
3. How can we design evaluations that help improve our teaching?
Dr. Gurtas and Dr. Hemraj-Benny suggested getting input from the administration. Dr. Gurtas also distributed sample mid-semester evaluations that could be used by faculty on their own to evaluate their course/teaching.
Prof. Mohess suggested testing any proposed evaluation forms for validity, something that Ian Beckford could help with.
The committee agreed that the evaluations should be one page long, in two parts, and feature 3-4 open-ended questions. The chairperson asked the Subcommittee on Evaluations (Mohess, Gurtas, Shekoyan) to come up with possible evaluation questions so we could discuss them at our next meeting.
6. Next meeting was scheduled for Friday, December 2, 2016 at 3pm.
7. The meeting adjourned at 5:30 p.m.
Respectfully submitted,
Mirna Lekic
Committee on Academic Development/Elective Academic Programs, Secretary
Minutes typed on 11-4-16
