NOTE: At times, issues of confidentiality may require that some items discussed in meetings be excluded from these minutes.

ALC MEMBERS: Charles Bachman, Tom Ball, Bill Barnes, Richard Bennett, David Caudill, Lance Crimm, Tom Currin, Venu Dasigi, Ameen Farooq, Alan Gabrielli, Jo Galle, Steven Hamrick, Ruston Hunt, Andrew McMorran, Joyce Mills, Julie Newell, Mark Nunes, Jeff Orr, Nikki Palamiotis, Phil Patterson, Dawn Ramsey, Jeffrey Ray, Nancy Reichert, Han Reichgelt, Ronny Richardson, Khalid Siddiqi, Sandra Stone, Denise Stover, John Sweigart, Zvi Szafran, Margaret Venable, Andy Wang, and Tim Zeigler

ALC Members Absent: Richard Bennett, Lance Crimm, Jo Galle

Guest: Sandra Vasa-Sideris

Item 1. Updates

Sandra Vasa-Sideris visited the Council to talk about the Faculty Compensation Committee survey and distributed a copy to the Council. She asked for feedback on the survey before it is sent out to faculty.

Dr. Szafran updated the Council on the following:

Letters of intent for a Bachelors Degree in Political Science and Masters in Instructional Design have been approved by the System Office; full proposals are being prepared
Game Design proposal is currently under budget revision.
Education – Dr. Szafran received email from KSU that they can’t do either of the two versions offered so we may be doing our own program.
Evening Engineering Programs – the survey from an independent company has been completed and results were sent to GA Tech a week ago Friday but no word yet from GA Tech. Unofficial results show industry support is mixed – our students have given positive feedback.
Hiring – Dr. Szafran sent a sample Chronicle ad for review and will be placed once individual ads and Forms A have been approved. Szafran stated that we will go forward with searches and interviews but the budget will ultimately determine which hires we are able to make.
Budget – no news – may know more after the election. Raises are not determined on our campus or at BoR – this is a legislative decision. The temporary good new is GIL Express has been reinstated.
The tentative date for opening the Tutoring center is October 6. Work is still being done on the elevator. John Lindsay will move to the Center and will staff it during the day and is working on getting the evenings staffed.
The ACCE review went very well; received very positive feedback from the team.
The Admissions/Registrars office has been reorganized – Steve talked about the promotion and changes. Julie asked for an updated list of who does what; Steve will send this out to the departments.

Item 2. Discussion—New Policy on Graduate Assistants

Nikki Palamiotis talked about proposed changes to the Graduate Assistantship Administration P+P she and Han Reichgelt have been working on and asked for comments/suggestions from the Council. The Graduate Assistantship administration will be housed in her office starting next semester. Issues/comments about the new policy included:

Restricting them to 14 versus 20 hours per week would cause hardship on departments using grad students to cover open labs, and force them to pay for an additional graduate assistant to cover the same hours previously covered.
Issue with supervision being required by someone in the student’s discipline, etc., which would make departments hiring students outside their department ineligible to hire graduate assistants
Needs to be rewritten to include departments who don’t have graduate programs
Opposed to having anyone else involved in the hiring process of graduate assistants for their department
In favor of proposed changes
Budget is an issue – who has budget for hiring graduate assistants and how is that determined?
Number of hours allowed to work is a problem
Han talked about pros of having central place for students to go when seeking assistantships
Han and Nikki will modify the document and bring back to the next ALC meeting. Han and Zvi will work on a fiscal rational for distributing assistantships among the departments

Item 3. Discussion—Summer Schedule

Steve distributed a modified summer block schedule for review and discussion. Zvi re-emphasized his commitment to advertising for the summer classes and especially for the last 5-week program and stated that the way faculty are paid in the summer will stay the same.

Item 4. Discussion—Expanding Number of Online Courses and our Role in e-Core

Two universities have pulled out of e-Core. Dr. Szafran asked the Council how we want to proceed and stated that we need to make a decision soon. These options were offered:

do our own version of e-core
continue the way we are currently
get out entirely

Dawn talked about need for e-Core support for our programs and the proposed Teaching Academy for Distance Learning (TADL) to prepare faculty to teach online. Ramsey talked about the necessary transition from Vista 3 to Vista 8, which the TADL will assist faculty with. She hopes to begin the conceptual part of TADL later this fall. The plan is to call for faculty who want to develop new on-line courses and for those without the necessary background to participate in TADL. Compensation for developing a course will still be $3,000, whether or not the faculty member is required to go through TADL. Szafran stated that as we grow, more classes will need to be offered online. Feedback from the Council:

Distance Leaning Taskforce has not supported all course developments--Priority from Distance Leaning Taskforce has always gone to certificates and on-line courses
Distance departmental support funds have not been allocated because of potential budget cuts
No plan to pull out of e-core in the immediate future
Core classes will still be available to students on-line, but if taken through another university, we won’t get the headcount/revenue
Dawn explained the financial implications of the different options
Discussion about the costs associated with developing our own e-core – cost structure depends on decisions made – course caps, full-time versus part-time faculty, etc.
Formula funding questions
How many e-Core student FTE’s do we have? Approximately 50
Need to stop lumping core and program courses
WebCT overburdened already
Online courses tend to have bigger retention/success issues
Need a course to teach students to take online courses
Retention problem bigger with e-Core than our own online courses
Decisions made by other departments have a huge impact on departments teaching core classes and that needs to be kept in mind when making these decisions
e-Core, Perimeter College & Darton College all offer core classes online
If we offer all core online we will need funding to support this
e-Core shells are available for most courses
Need more hybrid courses

Zvi asked Council members to email questions to him for the Distance Learning Taskforce to address, and also asked the four Arts and Sciences departments for feedback:

On-line education is second-rate education
Zvi asked if given resources would Math be willing to run a couple of test sections – Andrew McMorran will ask his faculty
Becky Rutherfoord talked about ThinkWell as a good program for online teaching which also includes video
Some difficulties with science labs in online courses
Students complain about fee for exam proctoring – fee ranges from nothing to $50 depending on location
Must have support for development and delivery of courses
On-line courses are problematic for students just starting college
Major part of collegiate experience involves community building which is different on line
Pedagogical issues, assessment issues, workload and class size issues, perception that online courses are easier for students and for faculty which is not the case
Becky argued that our students are very technological and should be able to handle on-line courses well
Must convince faculty that this will be a win/win situation and that their class sizes will remain in line with regular courses
Low residency as an option for lab science courses
Need to make sure that departments that are not represented on the Distance Learning Taskforce are involved in these discussions.

We will investigate the possibility of developing and offering test sections of selected core courses, and reviewing the results. The Distance Learning Task Force will also be charged with making recommendations to the ALC on key issues.

Item 5. Discussion—Gathering Data and Making Advising Part of Annual Assessment

Alan Gabrielli talked about the Advising Phase-in Plan developed by the Academic Advising Taskforce. The deans have been charged with collecting data on how their departments conduct advising. Dr. Gabrielli suggested that each faculty member include a narrative on their role in advising in their next annual review packet. After discussion it was decided that this data should be collected before the next evaluation cycle in the spring and in future years, become part of the annual review for faculty. Gabrielli will send out information and a sample form to the faculty regarding this.

Item 6. New Business

Mark Nunes announced that the First Year Experience Committee met this morning and asked the Council to keep up with happenings by reading their email from FYE@spsu.edu.

Meeting adjourned at 4:20 p.m.