UWGEC Minutes

Date: 21 January 2009

Time: 3:00-5:00 pm

Venue: UA Main Library - Special Collections Room

Doug Toussaint, Chair; Jim Riley, Vice Chair

Attending: Jonathan Beck, Laura Berry, Alison Betts, Gail Burd, Roxie Catts, Jacqueline Chanda, Tom Fleming, Amy Fountain,

Juan Garcia, Anne Marie Jones, Kim Jones, Ted Laetsch, Debbie Marlow, Paul Melendez, Sylvia Mioduski,, Judy Nolen, Celeste Pardee, Jeff Reid, Jim Riley, Sergey Shkarayev, Leslie Sult

AGENDA ITEM / OLD BUSINESS
DISCUSSION/ACTION/MOTION / NEW BUSINESS
DISCUSSION/ACTION/MOTION / FOLLOW-UP RESPONSIBLITY /
I. Call to Order/ UWGEC Members / Self introductions / New representatives – add to web page / Anne Jones
II. Minutes from last meeting / Approve December 2008 minutes / Since website is not password protected, the minutes were reproduced and distributed at the meeting. No vote was taken on approval. Members were asked to provide comments at the end of the meeting or online / Needs to be done at Feb meeting—Doug Toussaint
III. Current Issues / Report on questions:
1.  Proposal from Gail Burd
2.  Juan Garcia-Course availability 094 / 1. Gail Burd: See attachment 1
2. Juan Garcia: See attachment 2
IV. Working Groups/ Subcommittees
A. Ad hoc committee on cost cutting measures; Chair Paul Melendez, Roxie Catts, Malcolm Compitello, Amy Fountain / Report / No report for January / Stand by, may be needed.
B. Substitution Guidelines; Chair Jonathan Beck, Celeste Pardee, Erica Cirillo-McCarthy / Report on questions:
transfer policies statement / Item 1. on transfer policy was passed and is making its way through the system.
Item 2. ???? will be brought to UWGEC in February. / Ask Celeste to clarify.
C. General Education Policies; Chair Malcolm Compitello, Ted Laetsch, Kim Jones, Leslie Sult / Report Tier One pre req for Tier Two / No report for January
D. Periodic Course Review; Chair Tom Fleming, Michael Polakowski, Amy Fountain, Gwen Johnson / No report for January - committee progress currently on hold
E. Communications Gen Ed Experience; Chair Judy Nolen, Erica Cirillo-McCarthy, Bill Fee, Chris Johnson, Anne Marie Jones, Matthias Mehl / Report on recommendations in Dahlgran Report / Committee has not met recently. Judy estimates that it may require I FTE to clean up website especially if full syllabi are to be added. The new computer system, Mosaic, may be required.
JJR mentioned that we discussed before that it is not feasible or desirable to include full syllabi. He suggested that they focus on getting the links right. / Progress report at February meeting.
F. Honors Track; Chair Laura Berry, Dennis Ray, Jeff Reid, Roxie Catts, Rebecca Mitchell / The program is proceeding well and shows up on student SAPR’s. Nothing negative has been heard. We will soon need to decide whether to extend it for another year.
More honors course needed offering unique honors experience.
V. New Courses; Chair Anne Marie Hall, Dennis Ray, Nancy Stiller / Only 1 unit English course / Does this need to come to UWGEC for review? JJR
VI. New Business /Motions from working groups
VII. Liaison Reports
A. Transfer Articulation-Bill Fee and Brigid Murphy / No report for January
B. Undergraduate Council; Laura Berry / Question on 3+1 course availability ????
C. ACC Assessment Coordinating Committee; Representatives Anne Marie Hall and Jim Riley / There will be a UA Assessment Showcase entitled, “Best Practices in the Assessment of Learning and Teaching” held on Wednesday, February 11, 2009 at the Marriott University Park Hotel. Attendance is free, but you must register at:
http://assessment.arizona.edu.
D. Senate Task Force on Student Retention; Anne Marie Hall / Final report posted on GENED site.
/ This can be eliminated from standard agenda as the work of this task force has been completed.
VIII. Comments for the benefit of UWGEC-All / Juan Garcia-Budget issues impact of gened / JG: See Attachment 2
JJR: Please review membership of UWGEC to see if you would recommend any changes. / Include on agenda of Feb 09 meeting.
IX. Meeting Adjourned


ATTACHMENT 1

Gail Burd items:

A. Three plus one options

Gail Burd (GB) reported that she has decided that it is not practical to implement this proposed program within the aggressive timeline that was proposed (by Fall 2009). She indicated she is still interested in seeing an improvement in the assessment of the GENED program and that this model may be instituted at a later date. In the meantime, the programs being evaluated by the English Department will serve as pre-pilot information for the assessment program.

Anne-Marie Hall (AMH) described the two programs in the English department as follows: Attached unit to English 101, ENGL 197W, will emphasize writing skills. It will be piloted in Spring 2009. Consideration is being given to making it available without ENGL 101 in the future, so faculty could recommend students needing improvement in writing skills could take the ENGL 197W as a one unit course. In this one unit, writing skills are presented and practiced and then applied to other courses.

Attached to ENGL 102 is a unit of ENGL 197R, with emphasis on research, is being developed in conjunction with the UA Libraries. This will be piloted in Fall 2009. The supplemental unit exercises are deeply embedded in the curriculum and not likely to be offered outside of ENGL 102.

DISCUSSION

Jonathan Beck (JB): Asked if this could be applied to second language courses and programs.

Leslie Sult (LS): Self-graded weekly assessments on d2l are part of the ENGL 197R.

Ted Laetsch (TL): Instruction on graphs could be included in an extra unit for NATS Tier One classes.

Gail Burd (GB): I would favor trying to develop a supplemental unit for NATS which could be the next to be piloted. Remember that the Provost’s idea is to develop on-line courses that would provide extra dollars while requiring minimal extra salary costs. She might be willing to entertain proposals requiring modest funding for immediate consideration.

Paul Melendez (PM): Compressed video could be included in supplemental units.

Tom Fleming (TF): Classes taught in ILC 150 over the last few years were video taped so they could be searched. These can be seen in the Searchable Video Library on-line at: www.svl.arizona.edu

Jacqueline Chanda (JC): With regard to the proposals that would be entertained by the Provost, do they have to be new or could some older ones be considered?

GB: Either, if they save dollars.

JC: Art appreciation as a one unit online delivery has used fees generated from the course registration to pay for teaching assistants and graduate students to assist with the course delivery. With a class of 500 divided into 5 sections each was managed by a Teaching Assistant with these fees.

Judith Nolen (JN): Nursing used videos for their telemedicine to distribute beyond campus and added to their student base through this virtual course delivery mode using d2l.

B. Cost of Instruction

GB: There will be a reduction in the number of adjunct faculty and an increase in the teaching load of full time faculty. Less money is available for instruction for academic year 2009-2010. There is a question of how the target level of faculty teaching should be established. Should it, for instance be based on the number of students taught? Should writing requirements for gened be decreased so that the number of TA’s could be decreased? Then special courses in the gened program could be designated as writing emphasis courses. The cost of a teaching hour by faculty ranges from $11 to over $400 per hour. Discuss the model of the cost of instruction and the direct relation to instruction delivery and quality.

Laura Berry (LB): There could be two writing intensive classes, then survey class sizes could be increased. (The requirements could be made curriculum specific and not course specific.)

JN: On-line courses are intensive for faculty. (Aren’t we getting away from learning centered education?)

AMH/PM/JB/ et al: If classes are categorized into skills and ideas, the skills classes are more successful on-line.

Roxie Catts (RC): I have reviewed the Diversity Emphasis courses and found that some of them that do not currently satisfy Tier II requirements but she believes that some of them have the potential to do so. If we need more Tier II courses, urgently, for a short period of time, we might consider making some of these eligible for Tier II credit for the next two years or so.

General: We would need to confirm that they do not require prerequisites and what departments would think of enrolling more students in their courses for this purpose.

LB: We should form a special substitutions committee to review these.

JJRiley (JR): I suggest that we first establish what criteria are to be used to approve these and if they are really necessary for the Tier II program. (Gail Burd will send Jim Riley the list of courses that she and Roxie had discussed).

ATTACHMENT 2

A. Course availability for 094 Juan Garcia (JG): We are making our plans in the blind. We will try to keep classes full.

JG: Regarding the 3+1 for assessment, the English plans are great. I hope it is possible that they could serve as a pilot for future, similar courses in GENED. There is a proposal submitted to TRIF to expand the library model to include critical thinking.

B. Budget Issues-Impact on GENED: JG: The Budget Redesign Committee is working on developing a system where dollars follow the students. This is a simple concept, but complex to implement. It requires that the Mosaic/People Soft program be up and running. The dollars would go to the colleges and there would then be a tax on colleges for service courses provided to their students. Our target is to develop a working model by the end of May 2009. We will be holding forums for input around the campus soon. It will be about 1.5 years until the fully implemented programs for quality courses to be up and running. Drs. Shelton and Hay want faculty to receive financial incentives to teach. An example of the allocation to the colleges may be that 75% of the determined tuition funding will follow the student by the major, and the balance will go to the faculty (department/college) that offer the course. Indirect Cost Recovery (ICR) has this in place right now. Also, the first year of implementation would have a hold harmless clause in place to help implement the program. It is recognized that TA’s are essential to many programs, so this must be balanced with the attempt to decrease TA’s.

C. Faculty Review The Provost has made a decision, reported to the Deans’ Council, that the faculty review process will be used to identify faculty who have not established academic excellence, and they will be required to teach more. Faculty review this spring will review teaching loads and will impact Fall 2009. Expect serious fallout throughout the process; this model was forced forward based on economic realities. This will affect the graduate program and jeopardize the Research I status of the university. Juan asked the UWGEC members present to discuss this with their faculty and colleges.

JR: Doesn’t this mean that the old saying, “Those who don’t do—teach”? It does not seem to me to be a good policy to have poorest faculty assigned to teach.

D. Centennial Hall JG-The utilization of Centennial Hall as classroom space is being evaluated.

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