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DE Senate Distance Education Subcommittee

(Subcommittee of the SCC Academic Senate)

Meeting Minutes

Feb. 10, 2015

12:00-1:30 p.m.

LRC 120

Co-Chairs:Kandace Knudson & Daniel Gilbert-Valencia

Attendees: Marybeth Buechner, Nadine Kirkpatrick, Timothy Quandt, Sasha Friedman, Pat Hogarty, Gwyn Tracy, Norman Lorenz, Frank Malaret, Angela Block, Pam Posz, Elaine Ader, Patty Harris-Jenkinson, Sheley Little, Lisa Bauduin.

  1. Welcome
  2. Review of minutes from last meeting

Marybeth requested that we make sure these are online so that accreditation can link to them for evidence of these discussions.

  1. Review of committee charge
  2. Briefly discussed the other committees referenced in that charge: EIT, ED Tech

Is this the single point of contact for the whole campus or just the academic senate? Perhaps we should change the charge to clarify that we are the primary point of contact for the senate. We will discuss this later. We might need to talk about it next month. Not sure now if we should be the primary point of contact for the college.

3. Description of DE Team & Duties

Kandace and Daniel outlined the team roles and responsibilities:

David Martin, a 10-month classified staff, serves as the front-line assistance for instructional development. He maintains his office and regular drop-in lab hours in LR 114.

Daniel is the instructional development coordinator, a faculty role that leads and facilitates our colleagues’ use of instructional technology, especially learning management systems (D2L).

Kandace is the distance education coordinator, which serves as the campus coordinator for DE-related planning, practice, and regulation.

Our sister campuses have different DE team configurations: CRC has one faculty instructional development coordinator and 3 additional support staff. ARC has a DE coordinator, instructional development coordinator, and 1 support staff. FLC has one instructional development coordinator.

Currently, SCC has minimal to no summer services. The effort in the past that facilitated the summer institute at SCC was shifted toward the district-wide Innovate! Conference, which successfully ran during the last part of May, 2014. In the past, faculty who attended the summer institute at SCC would get some form of salary for attending outside the semester. Sheley suggested that we start up summer institute, which others agreed is very helpful for people who haven’t taught online. The group concurred that the campus needs some kind of summer support. Daniel and Kandace will discuss this and setup some sort of plan for coverage during the time periods that they will be here during the summer months. They will make a plan and get back to the group. The DE team will also make more consistent use of the ticketing system in order to document the DE and instructional development needs of the campus so that staffing can be adjusted according to need. The SCC DE team’s second support staff (50%) has disappeared as Tracey Valverde transferred to FLC. Kandace and Daniel will discuss the need for a replacement.

4. Announcements & updates from relevant committees

a. SOCRATES changes

  1. PJ Harris-Jenkinsontalked about the contact hours disappearing with the proposed changes to be implemented to the SOCRATES curriculum development system. There will be only 2 modes rather than several: DE or not DE. The system will also prompt for a percentage of distance instruction that will replace face-to-face instruction. Text boxes will be added to explain how the class will be taught. PJ reiterated that the task of the DE curriculum subcommittee is to determine whether the class is feasible to be delivered online.

Marybeth explained that as a college, we are required to track regular effective contact that faculty have with their online and hybrid students; the PRIE office has been depending a great deal on the information in SOCRATES for required reporting. Any proposed changes that will—in effect—reduce the amount of information in SOCRATES will impact the campus’s efforts at gathering info for reporting purposes. Marybeth wants better ways of gathering relevant data and is concerned that these changes might make it more challenging for such reporting. PJ said that the changes are expected to be implemented in the next few weeks.

b. Ed Tech

Nothing to report

c. District Ed Tech

The District office has agreed to pursue formal integration of Pearson publisher software (e.g. My Math Lab) into D2L so that students use their district logins through the secure D2L interface. The district IT team has committed to placing this high on their priority list.

There has been a significant change in the district IT prioritizing of D2L-related support—now the D2L requests have been combined into the bigger IT priority list, which means that D2L priorities are often superseded by IT priorities. Doug Meline is trying to figure out how to best organize the IT group, and this is one manifestation of that.

SSSP position: SSSP funds were used to hire an analyst to get D2L data to CIVITAS. They hired a dbase analyst to work with the CIVITAS data, and Rawan got a promotion and became the senior D2L analyst. She is funded by 50% SSSP and can work on the prioritized D2L list only 50% of the time. They are hiring to fill Rawan’s position, vacated when she was promoted.

d. LMS coordinators

Pearson integration is a priority for the LMS coordinators, as is the pass-through authentication of Google apps. One problem that was discussed by the group is that students cannot use their mobile devices to move documents from Google drive directly to D2L. A suggested workaround is that students have a Dropbox.com account and app on their mobile devices where they will be able to move files from Google directly to Dropbox, from which they can then upload to D2L.

e. Deans

Nothing to report

5. Updates from last meeting

a. OER work group (Kandace, Nicole, Mary Ann, Daniel)

This work group aims to explore the campus use of Open Educational Resources and the potential for increased use of OERs. Tim volunteered to join the group, and Kandace welcomes any and all participation. To ensure that curriculum is a part of the discussion, PJ (chair of the DE curriculum subcommittee) will be kept apprised of the group’s work.

b. ADA work group (Daniel, Pat Elaine, Gwyn, Gabriela, Kandace)

The ADA work group is a collaborative group between the EIT and DE committees, investigating and seeking to improve faculty efforts to comply with ADA regulation in the DE environment. Sasha volunteered to join up.

c. DSPS expert to visit May 8th (save the date)

Coming May 8—faculty workshop focused on accessible course delivery.There will also be a second workshop for administrators and deans. This event will be recorded in the COVE.

d. E-services DE-related issues

Several constituencies on campus are aware of the challenges that students face when using eservices, and efforts to make improvements are beginning to snowball. Of particular concern to DE is the Notes section in the schedule, which appears (often garbled and embedded in HTML text) in the student’s shopping cart. The schedule notes are developed in the department or division and then sent to the VPI office for insertion in the schedule. Daniel and Kandace have forwarded suggested Notes templates to the deans via Mary Turner and to the department chairs directly. District IT is also examining the difficulties students face when attempting to enroll in DE courses.

1:30—meeting adjourned. Kandace and Daniel will post the last campus strategic plan to the D2L shell for this committee and will send around an email soliciting feedback on the plan for discussion at the next meeting, which will be Tuesday, March 9 from 12-1:30 in LRC 120.

Future agenda items:

DE Strategic Plan

Peer review/best practices momentum

7145 DO Policy—what it means in practice

Accreditation

LTT—Jory’s return