Minutes of the

Academic Task Force Meeting

3 May 2007

The Task Force considered implications of Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Beheruz Sethna’s presentation of the University System of Georgia's strategic plan earlier in the day. The ATF focused on two areas: re-imagining the Core and teaching online.

1. “Blowing up” the current core

· Perhaps we need to help the Regents’ avoid over-assessment.

· Will competency testing create a Regents’ Test for every class and result in teaching to the test?

2. More on-line courses

• Putting a Master’s of Arts in teaching program online could be a good idea.
• Hybrid part-online/part-classroom classes could improve efficiency.
• Some courses and fields are more appropriate for online instruction than others.
• Maybe we need to rethink (and fund) how we approach online course development. Now we often just do what we’re already doing and try to make it fit into Vista.
• Perhaps we should offer an online course to learn how to teach online.
• Before plunging into online courses, we should get historical and recent retention data for 1000, 2000, and 3000 level eCore classes.
• Questions about online courses:

a) Is it ethical to have revenue-stream as a main goal?

b) Should we do research on online learning, who’s doing it well and how they’re doing it?

c) How do we measure efficiency?