The Social Sciences Task Force meeting April 28, 2017 1pm-3pm
The Social Science Task Force met Friday, April 28, 2017 from 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM at the Rio Grande Campus in Room 125. The following faculty members were in attendance: Geoffrey Andron,Jason Briggeman,Iris Diamond,Stuart Greenfield, Cedric Grice,Carol Hayman, Sherry Heiden, Steve Howard,Don Jonsson, Livingstone Kumassah, Paul Lehman,Patty Leo,Mary Jane McReynolds,Melissa Noel,Lizzie Pintar, Carleen Sanchez,Ian Strachan,and James Sondgeroth.
1. Approve agenda
2. Approve the minutes of last meeting (
3. Introduce new Department Chair of Social Science, Elizabeth Pintar.
4. Report on Distance Learning and regulations regarding Accessibility.- Carleen Sanchez.
5. Economics DAC: proposed future assessment method--GeofAndron
6. The Celebration of Great Teaching Retreat – Iris Diamond
7. Take action on Early College Start economics course requests for Fall 2017
8. Request to add an Open Access textbook for cultural anthropology- Carleen Sanchez
9. New AR requiring departments to use Faculty Enlight system. Instructors order own texts or have administrative assistant order them via Enlight?
10.Carleen Sanchez will present her project that is part of the ACC Faculty Fellows
11. Adjourn
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1. Approve agenda
Action: Agenda approved.
2. Approve the minutes of last meeting (
Action: Minutes approved.
3. Introduce new Department Chair of Social Science, Elizabeth Pintar.
Lizzie Pintar was introduced as the new Department Chair beginning in the fall 2017 semester. Lizzie said she hoped to be a great chair and to get to know all instructors better. Lizzie would like to encourage task force members to get in touch with her and let her know what issues they may have and how they can work together in the future. Lizzie is looking forward to serving the department well.
Sherry requested that we could keep the future task force meetings at RGC in 3000 building.
4. Report on DIL and regulations- Carleen Sanchez-
Our new Distance Learning Dean, Erasmus Addae, jumped right into his new role and information will be coming out soon regarding changes to distance learning. The current focus for the Distance Learning Committee and the new Dean is working on getting our policies and practices in line with state requirements.
Carleen stated that materials and media shown in class and used in online classes must be ADA compliant with closed caption capabilities. The same requirement applies to all videos in your online classes,anyyoutube videos and including descriptions of images on powerpoint presentations. Carleen stated that ACC does have a lot of resources to help become ADA compliant with our instructional designers on your campus, or the distance learning office.
Iris stated that she would sometimes pull up a video to assist in explaining a difficult concept. Iris asked if this is now not a possibility as we have to know they are closed captioned ahead of time? It was mentioned that if you use those materials you would do so at your own risk. Youtube will usually have captioning possibilities. Iris asked about video clips of radio shows.
Lizzie pointed out that every picture online has to have closed captioning so it can translate to whatever system the student uses. When you insert pictures into Blackboard, you should provide a simple description so those with sight problems will know what the picture is.
Carleen said that ACC does provide free services to close caption your materials.Sherry asked if media services provided any kind of captioning or voice recognition service for faculty. Carleen was unsure about the range of things that they provide but that they will work with us. Carleen recommended that you give these offices plenty of notice to get materials updated.
Carol Hayman asked about videos in the libraries. Carleen said that most of the videos in the library are closed captioned but if you come across one that isn’t she would recomend choosing a different video. Media that comes from a company is copyright protected and therefore sometimes we can’t provide an alternate track to it. So ask the librarians if they can do that for you or if they have the ability to obtain the license. If the video has a transcript in lieu of captions that is okay.
Jim went over the designations for online classes including DIL and HYD and HYB. In order for a course to be DIL a student can’t be required to come to a campus for any reason. The distance learning office said that you can have all your tests in the testing centers as long as you allow distant testing.They also have a new technology using ProctorU.
There is current debate on a third distinction which would be in between the two and might allow an on campus orientation or limited testing on campus. Hybrid C and Hybrid D Jim said and Hybrid C was classroom 51% and hybrid D was 51% distance learning. Now Hybrid D distance learning is any presence at an ACC campus. You will be on the distance learning schedule but you are flagged so students will know you will have on campus requirements.
Information item only.No action
5. Economics DAC: proposed future assessment method--GeofAndron
Jim said that Geoff was saddled with this duty because he vehemently disagreed with the assessment instrument Jim used for Macro this past semester and for which he will be recording the results on TracDat soon.
Geoff assured everyone that whatever proposal he came up with it would not require the economics instructors to change what they were doing in their classes. The proposal, if approved, will contain eight or ten different criteria designed to get a green light towards our program. We of course want to avoid a yellow or a red caution light. Something better than a green light is a blue light which means exemplary. There are a couple of issues in getting a proposal to be exemplary. Of course our goal is to have two mutually incompatible goals. One goal is to come up with a system that we can use to improve the quality of instruction. The other goal is to come up with a proposal which will keep the monkeys off our backs. The learning and educational process began with a meeting that Geoff and JIm attended and we learned that certain words are not good words to use in proposals. One of the bad words is understand. You should not use “understand” in describing an outcome of our instruction. We don’t teach people how to understand something because you can’t measure something called that. They came up with better words like explain or measure. I hope everyone can understand this; if you can’t, you probably cannot understand hierarchies. Geoffrey decided mostly to use the word explain… we teach students to explain things. How good a job do they do at explaining it and we teach them to teach us. Explain seems to be a word that might give us green lights. The next thing he did is he talked with Jim and then with David Lauderback, our Interim dean. The Dean listened to Geoffrey's proposal, and he said he liked it. But he also said that we are gonna have trouble getting green lights on the proposal. We are going to have to change it in certain ways. Geoffrey said he wasn’t going to change it. At the end of that David offered to translate our proposal into government talk. Geoffrey was going to ask Michael Petrowsky’s help with this, but he also can have a conference with those that have to be satisfied. He sits at his computer. He takes my proposal and he puts the words into the document so it is translated and when he is done the consequence is you end up with words in the document that you don’t understand. My strategy is to do that. The first thing Geoff learned is that we have PSLO’s but they aren’t the most fundamental. The common course objectives according to Jim are those objectives listed in your syllabus and is the boilerplate we list as stuff we are all supposed to teach. What the pros do is to summarize several of these common course objectives into one. Perhaps if you are good citizen,you were teaching five or six items. The trick is to come up with PSLO’s that have something to do with your subject which include or embrace several common course objectives. He had to look at the common course objectives to make sure everything we want to teach is in there which he did for macro and micro. The proposal will only be for Macro at first. Geoffrey will provide the proposed macro common course objectives after we finish with our exams and grading. Please take a look at my new proposed common course objectives and imagine that you replace the old boiler plate in your syllabus with the new boilerplate. The main thing that you would want to do is to make sure that in each major subject area you list that you have the option of not teaching everything it might cover. It is almost impossible to get to everything in Macro. They are goals rather than achievements. The current PSLOs for macro are listed on the next page and Geoffrey has drafted modified PSLOs; you might want to give some attention to those. Geoffrey said his proposal is for each teacher of Macroeconomics to do this exercise for all three PSLOs. For each PSLO do the following; select one exercise that you already do that in your opinion falls under that PSLO and pledge to do that same exercise one year from now. Any exercise you want and then one year later at the same time in the class using the same grading requirements do it again. Geoffrey respectfully requests that the pass rate on this exercise be sufficiently challenging so that among your group of students the pass rate is not 99 percent. The pass rate should be between 60-85 percent using your standards. Those are the only requirements that he requests that you satisfy with respect to the exercise. In Geoffrey's case he gives a final exam which measures what students have learned on that particular topic. Geoffrey is going to pick 1 exam question that is related to each PSLO and will remind himself to give those same exam questions next year on the final exam. You may have a homework assignment that is exactly, in your opinion, right on the money a good assignment that demonstrates the student's’ capabilities in some area in week 7. Or maybe it is one particular exam out of a chapter in the textbook. Geoffrey doesn’t care what exercise you use just use the same one next year. Having done this and then you will need to send Geoffrey a copy of the exercise so he has a record of what we did. Other than that you will turn in three numbers on the PSLO being assessed. The first number is how many were enrolled in the class at the time that you gave that exercise, #2 is how many people turned in the exercise, and number three is the percentage that passed that exercise. Geoffrey will gather those numbers for each section taught and for each PSLO. And that will be the data.
Jim attempted to summarize the proposal to substitute or replace our old macro and micro course objectives with the ones that Geoffrey has rewritten here. Also Geof proposes to replace the current PSLOs with the new ones Geof has written, and finally Geof proposes that every faculty member test for each PSLO in macro for this year and micro for next year. Jim asked if Geoffrey had done micro and looked at the cycle of different general education principles that they want tested and that we have correlated with the old ones.
Geoff said for each PSLO there are other lists like critical thinking and that govttalk people like to see check marks in boxes. If PSLO number 2 is something that helps you with critical thinking you can put a check mark there. Geoff felt it was a trivial exercises. If we are doing those PSLO and one of those general education outcomes doesn’t have a check mark that is because it does not have a check mark. We are not obligated to teach some characteristic which is not inherent in micro or macroeconomics.
Jim stated that some of the old PSLOs are more appropriate for certain general education objectives than are others and some general education objectives that have to be covered every third year are more correlated with a Micro course for example how to make good decision. Geoff said our goal is to teach economics with integrity and if a certain PSLO doesn’t have that particular general education objective then we do not put an x mark next to it. No penalty for not putting x marks. Jim said that if you are not going to specify what evaluation instrument is used and you leave it up to every instructor for each PSLO then why not start next semester and collect these measurements for all of the PSLOs for both micro and macro? Geoff said this exercise isn’t going to be very helpful for the point of improving our teaching or our quality of education and we are not required to evaluate all of the courses we teach so my suggestion is to do one and see whether we get away with it. See how many green lights we can get before we double down and put ourselves through a lot of work.
Geoffrey said the second part of the proposal is to propose that we actually try to improve the quality of education and let's assume we do it in macro. I propose for the improvement part that we have two or three seminars and economists get together and find the people that seem to have a good way to teaching this or that and we will ask them to speak for 10 minutes about whatever it is and then we will all discuss that particular teaching strategy that they are using and then we will go on and do two or three in an hour and all of us can learn from each other what the possibilities might be to modify our courses and then we are free to modify or not modify. Geoffrey has been told that they will love that part. Jim asked why we don’t just do away with the micro PSLO? Geoff said his proposal was having to deal with the PSLOs not what the PSLOs area. That part is maybe you all would rather not go through the trouble and maybe go through the existing PSLOs. The biggest weakness of Geoffrey’s proposal is that you may keep an essay that requires two weeks or work or Geoffrey may use a question he found on the final exam. People might determine that Geoffrey’s students are learning more in their pass/ fail question than students did in some other instructors section. We might have to have a different cohort. Jim said that the the people that control the system might complain that we are not evaluating all of our students with the same instrument. JIm felt this was a brilliant idea to have everyone choose whatever they want and then send it on, but then you are going to put everyone of those techniques there and they are going to look at it and press the red light button.
Jim asked other economists for their opinion explaining that instructors wouldn’t be required to do one assignment like we required this semester, you can do whatever you want as long as it somehow measures one of these PSLOs. Either they pass it or fail it and the percentage of pass is reported to Geoffrey. Geoffrey said it doesn’t have to be an educational exercise. It only has to be a measuring exercise. Stuart asked if they had been given to them or could we agree that the three you accepted were accepted. Let's assume we all agree and we accept these how Stuart might evaluate it might be with a paper and Geoffrey might give two questions. Why can’t we just develop five questions that address these three learning objectives and that could be administered by the department through Blackboard. Then when students took it we would have a standardized measure of all classes. Jim said this is how it was done before but this exercise is that one of the general learning objectives was to demonstrate ability to use technology so Jim’s question is how to do that in a multiple choice question. Stuart said you could ask a student what is the growth rate from 1897 to 1992 and you would offer them the data and they could calculate the growth rate. Geoffrey said that would be great if our goal is to teach them technical expertise. Stuart said you want something to integrate using technology to address the new PSLOs. Jim said that Geoff should write up the proposal and send it out to all faculty. Jim said we would need it by the beginning of fall semester if we are going to do this.
Carleen completed anthropology. Carleen said they were doing the essay evaluation. Carleen said it is a lot more complicated because not only do you have to correlate the PSLOs with the overall institutional outcomes and requirements which includes critical thinking, civic awareness and all kinds of performative art. It's really complicated. We are just going to collect a few things and send in the paperwork.