Meeting Minutes for System Set-Up Group

(part of the Disappearing Task Force for AMS Implementation)

Wednesday, 3/4/2015, Ilima 202B

Goals for the meeting:

Updates

  • Assessment Coordinator 
  • Time change for Monday meetings, reminder
  • LAT Implementation group
  • Communication
  • Non-academic implementation update
  • Integration
  • Mission Statement  “Description”

System Set-Up Decisions:

  • Data upload issues. 
  • Mapping tool terminology
  • Total Course Listing
  • Pilot Document
  • Welcome message
  • Pre-piloting

Pilot Launch Checklist

UPDATES

  1. Assessment Coordinator:
  2. Job has been pushed back two weeks due to a policy that requires that the legislature is informed of any new temporary positions.
  3. Applicants who have already applied will have the opportunity to indicate that they would still like their application to be considered.
  4. The screening committee members are trained by HR and will work feverishly once the position opens so that they can be finished with screening by mid-May.
  5. Other updates from members of the selection committee?

Laure will clip out the advertisement in the Honolulu Start Bulletin for the selection committee’s records.

  1. Upcoming meeting time change (reminder):
  2. Meetings with Emily will be moved to 9:30 a.m. starting March 9.
  3. LAT Implementation Group
  4. We continued to view the layout and functionality of the LAT. Of special interest was the demo on how to make rubrics and link with outcomes.
  5. Notes from this week’s LAT meeting will be sent with the minutes from this meeting.

It is important to consider Ron’s points from the CAC Accreditation and Assessment Work Group meeting on 3/3/2015. Some of his points on LiveText adoption:

  • Culinary faculty members were given a stipend to attend workshops over the summer on LiveText. The training included working with a consultant/mentor to set up rubrics. Rubric templates were provided, they fine-tuned the rubrics.
  • Despite the training, it is a challenge to get instructors to use it. 25% adoption rate. Ron: a mandate is needed for full adoption. (Adoption currently optional.)
  • Culinary plans to switch over to Taskstream next academic year (2015-2016). Some instructors are reluctant to learn LiveText since Taskstream will be adopted next year. *We need to budget LAT licenses for Culinary.*
  • They are using LiveText for both formative and summative assessments. Formative assessments include on-the-spot assessment with the iPad. This doesn’t always work well because the instructor may need to suddenly help in a situation or otherwise use hands, and having the iPad is cumbersome. May want to use only for summative assessment.
  • Issue: students who have purchased LiveText in the same class with those who have not. Also, if student purchase the system for a class but don’t use it again, they get mad that they spent the money and it was never used again. Important issues to consider.
  1. Communication
  2. Amy sent bulletin blasts to Sunny for revisions.
  3. The group made changes to News Flash #2. Amy will post News Flash content on a GoogleDoc for further changes.
  4. We would like to change the image on the welcome page in Taskstream. Amy will ask Sal for nice images of the stained glass window.
  5. Ohana site progress.
  6. Would be nice to use the TS logo on the thumbnail. Amy will ask Craig if that is possible.
  7. Amy to check with Emily about any legal issues regarding using the Taskstream logo in our News Flash flyers and also in the Ohana site thumbnail.
  8. Non-academic update from Dawn:
  9. The group has figured out how to build the counseling matrix into Taskstream and is currently inputting the mapping. They hope to input some "dummy data" next Monday afternoon and run a few reports to see if the mapping is correct.
  10. Integration Process
  11. Update from Steph. If a Taskstream “external tool” is added to Laulima, it would be system-wide. This means that colleges who are not using Taskstream would see it as an option, might accidentally add it, resulting in questions to the Laulima “help” desk and perception of errors. Better option: Have the instructors provide a link to Taskstream in their Laulima site. A simple set of steps on how to do this can be provided. Users will have to re-log in (as opposed to full integration in Laulima), using their UH username and password, which shouldn’t be a problem.
  12. Any further thoughts on the need to integrate with myuh? Otherise, let’s start without a myuh and see if we need to add it. Agreed.
  13. Please peruse the site for any strange occurrences of “Description” where “Mission Statement” used to be. Ok

DISCUSSION AND DECISIONS REQUIRED

  1. Hierarchy and General Education. After much discussion, it was decided that General Education should be added to the hierarchy at the “Level 1” level. It will show up as “Institution/General Education.” Any entity can map to the Gen. Ed. outcomes, including non-academic. For example counseling may map to Gen. Ed. in the future. At a later date, when the institutional outcomes are different from the Gen. Ed. outcomes, we can separate them in the hierarchy. The group engaged in a rich discussion about General Education (its role at the college, how general education is achieved, its assessment and more).
  2. Steph will ask Emily to add this to the hierarchy and also to make some changes that were previously requested but don’t appear to have been completed. Update: Emily now working on making all the changes.
  3. Data Upload.
  4. Taskstream prefers to do one large upload, but can do a smaller one. Options:
  5. Send them the entire upload at once, but ask the team to create and populate (with course description and outcomes) the workspaces for the pilots first.This is our second choice, but would also work and it seems that it is the preferred method for Taskstream. Also, since the data entry is manual, an upload pilot may not be necessary.
  6. Do a separate mini-upload of the pilots first. This would be ideal, since it could serve as a pilot of the upload as well.
  7. We could also create the workspaces for the pilots, but it would be a less authentic user experience since the course description and the outcomes would not be populated. Disregard this option.
  8. Taskstream Data entry people could also do the mapping, but we may want to have our own faculty members do this mapping work. Question: there is both mapping in the mapping tool (introduced, practiced, reinforced etc.), and also mapping in the outcomes tool (more like just course to program alignment). We would want Taskstream to do the second type of mapping?
  9. Having the term “mapping” indicate two separate processes is confusing. How course outcomes/competencies feed into program outcomes is specifically “mapping” in assessment terminology (and is unchangeable in Taskstream), so that remains the same. We changed the second type of mapping to “Activity to Course Outcome Matrix” at the course level and “Course to Program Matrix” at the program level. (General University used the term “Activity Map.”) Note: Amy will change the terminology in the pilot document.
  10. Currently, we plan to have Taskstream users do both types of mapping. We are not sure the data could be exported/imported correctly. In addition, the mapping process is a valuable exercise in the assessment process.
  11. Big question: Currently, the course outcome-to-program outcome mapping is done in curriculum central, and there is an extensive review process. (How much the reviewers actually examine the mapping is unknown.) We don’t yet know if this functionality will exist in the new curriculum system. If we have users enter their own mapping, how can we ensure accuracy? This would affect the integrity of program data if the mapping is not accurate.
  12. We don’t know if the new curriculum system will have the mapping functionality. (Amy asked Susan Pope for an update on this, she may know more on Monday. She asked on our behalf on Friday at the Kuali session of HSI WILD.)
  13. One idea: Submit an action request to Faculty Senate to clarify who is responsible for the accuracy of the linking between course competencies and program outcomes. This decision is beyond the scope of the Taskstream Implementation group.
  14. Question for the group: I had a note “Ask Emily mapping” and don’t know what I meant. It may have had to do with the review process or it may have become irrelevant after further discussion. If anyone remembers what I needed to ask her, please let me know!
  15. Was Louise able to find out from Faculty Senate how many course updates are on the list for Monday’s FS meeting? This will help us to determine when we should capture the most recent list of courses. We did not ask Louise, as she had to leave early. Amy will ask via email. Update: There were no updates, only deletions. Susan sent Amy the list.
  16. Update/Questions from Than (Curriculum Central programmer):Did not get to this.
  1. For course description (#15), is formatted content acceptable? For example, course description allows faculty to bold, italicize, underline and change font sizes. See attached outlines (ANTH 215 & BIOL 275L). Depending on what is needed in the Task Stream application, I may need to cleanse course outlines before sending.
  2. For course competencies (#21), faculty have options to enter in a single text box and/or one-by-one. I will have to create 2 separate files to send. The first contains the list of items in your request and the second contains competencies for each course.

…I can work with the Task Stream directly or we can discuss via telephone if you have comments or questions. If there's no cleansing (removing text format), I can get things done by Monday. Otherwise, it may be end of next week. Attached XLS file gives an idea of what raw data looks like without cleansing.

Amy will ask Emily who to put Than in touch with. First we need to decide if formatting should stay (bold, etc.) Update: formatting is not an option in those fields of Taskstream. Also, should we also ask Than to extract the “effective date” so we can make sure no Fall 16 effective dates get uploaded? We can also ask Will and Kapu. (Amy asked, awaiting answer).

Update: Curriculum Committee no longer reviews effective dates.

  1. We don’t want/need the data entry team to upload old CLRs or do we? Would they be willing to rename based on our conventions? Would it be worth the effort of getting the files to the data entry team? No need to ask Taskstream to do this.
  1. Terminology to be used in the curriculum mapping tool (now called “matrix” at both the course and program level, see 2b, first bullet point).

We changed the terminology in Taskstream in the following ways:

  • Course level: a simple check mark indicates which course activities are used to reach course outcomes.
  • Program level:
  • Preparatory Level, abbreviation LP (sorry Louise!)
  • Level 1, abbreviation L1
  • Level 2, abbreviation L2
  1. Total Course Listing:
  2. Amy almost doneTotal Course Listing, should be able to send to Emily by Thursday.
  3. Please help Amy with a few outstanding questions. No time, Amy will ask relevant people via email. Update: Amy and Louise reviewed Amy’s question on Friday.
  4. After this, course nodes can be created by Taskstream.
  1. “Getting Ready to Pilot Taskstream” document has been updated, ready to send to pilots.

Amy needs to change a few things based on today’s discussion (matrix), will send Monday.

  1. Welcome Message: Current message Will do this over email, ran out of time.

Kapi‘olani Community College (AMS) has selected Taskstream AMS to provide an effective way to document, analyze, manage and archive the outcomes assessment and accountability initiatives at all levels of the institution.
We look forward to providing you with intuitive and reliable Web-based software and the highest level of supporting services. To learn about what you can do with Taskstream, visit our main Help page.

What type of welcome message do we want to communicate here? Let’s brainstorm some ideas and Amy can draft up some potential welcome messages.

  1. Ideas on pre-piloting? Amy will include the group’s courses in a “first in line” request for setting up the workspaces.
  2. Directions: see the Workspace template directions on Google doc.
  3. Questions for Emily:
  4. Amy will ask Emily what format works best for the Taskstream data entry team. Or maybe put Than in touch with Taskstream data entry team is best.
  5. Ask Emily about Taskstream logo and licensing issues. Can we use it in our newsletter and in the Ohana thumbnail.
  6. Ask about “first in line” for data upload for pilots and implementation team courses.
  7. How does the creation of workspaces at the program level work? Will Taskstream make them based on the hierarchy? No data upload to program level workspaces.
  8. Steph will be in touch with changes to the hierarchy. Added Gen. Ed. and there are some other changes that did not seem to go through. Update: Emily will make the changes.
  9. What is the process of creating the workspaces? Is it based on the Total Course Listing or from our data upload? What happens in the case of a discrepancy?
  10. Outstanding items for pilot launch:
  11. Send Total Course Listing to Emily
  12. Send pilots the “How to Prepare…” document
  13. Create accounts for pilots
  14. Finalize course and program templates
  15. Directions
  16. Mapping terminologydone
  17. Change welcome message and image
  18. Complete data upload for pilot workspaces
  19. Enroll course nodes in the “Course Assessment” workspaces (done by Taskstream)
  20. Amy send Emily the list of courses and programs that should be first in line.
  21. Enroll program nodes in “Program, Degree, Certificate Assessment” workspaces.
  22. Associate users with nodes
  23. Provide pilots with training