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Home >> Vice President Academic Affairs >> Meeting Minutes >> Deans Council

Deans Council

Deans Council Meeting

B-120

December 7, 2011

 

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

Members:  Bill Barnes, Dave Caudill, Tom Currin, Steve Hamrick, Ruston Hunt, Joyce Mills, Thomas Nelson, Jeff Orr, Nikki Palamiotis, Jeffrey Ray, Han Reichgelt, Zvi Szafran

Members Absent:  

Guests:  Greg Conrey

 

Item 1. Updates

Dr. Szafran updated the Council on the following:

• Higher Ed Re-authorization Act – requires all institutions to have a mechanism in place on their website where students can launch a complaint and must notify students about the procedure to follow.
• Library – will be having the final meeting today regarding the chiller, which is now working.
• PSLSAMP and NSBE – several students won awards for their presentations
• SPSU 1001 – Sarah Holliday is the new coordinator for SPSU 1001.  All faculty teaching SPSU 1001 will need to get together prior to the semester to share information about teaching this course.  Reminder – all faculty teaching SPSU 1001 must report grades.
• Desire to Learn – will be our new learning system
• SACS – Becky Rutherfoord and Bob Homer attended a SACS meeting recently and will meet with the Council in early January for a debriefing.  Our fifth year report is becoming more and more complicated, according to Becky, and we will need to form teams and write the report in the Fall of 2012.  Our fifth year report is due in March 2015.
• e-Core – Russ Hunt reported that the enrollment in those courses is significantly up since being administered by West Georgia.  More schools are participating and they are aggressively marketing e-Core.  SPSU participation is growing more than any other school and has the highest course retention rate.  Russ Hunt agreed to pull data to show whether or not we have enough students to fill a section here.  Per Russ, SPSU receives revenue from e-Core – approximately 40% revenue with no cost to the University and sees this as a service to our students with no harm to the University.
• Adult Learning Consortium –Szafran attended a meeting recently and met yesterday with Maury Fiddler on our campus.  He sees major changes coming in education and sees faculty becoming facilitators to learning as more and more information becomes available outside the classroom.  We need to discuss PLA in the near future and how it may impact our faculty and students.
• Orientation – will be next Wednesday at 2:15 PM.  Szafran reminded the Council to review class numbers and add sections where needed.
• RPG – Steve reported that Kelly is updating and creating new reports to help pull data on RPG.  The new reports will be named WRPG XXX, etc. to help identify them and stated that Kelly is willing to rename any existing reports as well to help make them more identifiable.

 

Item 2. K Buildings & Other Renovations

Szafran reported on the estimates for cleaning up the environmental issues in the K Buildings which would be approximately $130,000 for the three buildings.  They also need new roofs which would cost approximately $500,000 and could come from MRR money.  Alternately, to demolish the buildings would be approximately $300,000.  To bring the buildings up to a good standard would cost approximately $4-5 million dollars; building a new building would not cost much more. 

The dilemma is that the Board of Regents and the legislators are pushing for renovations instead of new construction.  It has been decided to clean up the buildings but that decision didn’t take into account the additional roof costs.  The Council needs to come up with a plan for the use of the buildings to include no structural changes and only low-level interior changes.  We will set aside a time for the deans to walk through the buildings and evaluate the space and prioritize space utilization proposals for that space and others and to see what could be housed in those buildings.  Jeff Ray stated that he has serious concerns about the structure of the buildings. 

Szafran also reported that Building E is coming along nicely with minor cost overruns, Building I1 is still being negotiated with the Board of Regents, and the CSE Data Center is still working out some technical issues.

 

Item 3. DegreeWorks Issues

Issues regarding DegreeWorks included that the CTE training given to faculty was not sufficient and that Tom Ball and Vanessa Bard have offered four training sessions so far to their students and faculty and are finding that faculty are unable to do what DegreeWorks states that they can do.  Ball also stated that there are good things in DegreeWorks but issues are causing serious problems and faculty and students are not using it.  Ball prepared some recommendations regarding DegreeWorks and distributed his handout to the Council.  Steve Hamrick will look into the issues reported and is willing to help in any way possible.  He stated that neither he nor Maralee Clark was invited to the CTE training, which might have been helpful.  Both he and Maralee are working on correcting known issues and reiterated that he is willing to train anyone that needs it.