MEMBERS PRESENT:
Truman Bashore, Matha Schleinitz, Ruth Barney, Ann Miller, and Iden
Smith
APPROVAL OF
MINUTES: The minutes of the March 18 were approved as submitted.
The team
discussed plans for the online instruction workshop in the fall. The
chair will contact VP Lootens to determine the amount of time allotted
for this during fall duty days. The plan is to have Ann Miller, Brad
Reed, TR Ruddick, and Janice Michael make short presentations followed
by a roundtable discussion.
The team
discussed various issues related to online courses. Among the items
discussed were:
- Some courses
have common online materials which are used by all of the instructors.
For other courses each instructors develops his or her own materials.
- In some
situations it may be beneficial to have someone in a department
prepare some common online materials for use in all sections of the
course. Individual instructors could use these along with their own
materials.
- It seems
logical to have faculty progress from traditional courses to web flex
to completely online.
- Blackboard
materials that are supplied by some publishers are not usually
desirable. Faculty have more ownership if they develop their own
materials.
- The online
course development process developed by the CQI Distance Learning Team
has not been followed. People are not contacting the IT staff to get
help 4 months before the course begins.
The team
discussed the data on success rates of students. Things noted and
discussed include:
- In almost all
cases students in traditional classes had a higher success rate than
students in online or web flex classes.
- When online
course have low success rates, communication between the faculty
member and students seems to be a problem.
- Before a
course goes online, someone with knowledge and experience in online
instruction needs to look at it and provide feedback.
- Faculty
developing online courses might benefit from having a mentor who would
meet with them as they developed the course. The mentor would be paid
and would meet a certain minimum number of times with the person
developing the course.
- The team
suggests that each division Dean visit all course sites in his or her
division to determine the quality of the courses.
When examining
the success comparison data presented, several items were mentioned.
·
Saturday Express courses were listed as a
separate category. They are actually traditional courses and should be
included with the traditional courses.
·
Students who change sections may show up as
having dropped or withdrawn. This may give a false impression of number
of drops or withdrawals. It may be necessary to examine this issue to
determine whether it significantly affects success rates.
·
A team member asked that the percent of
FUW’s in each type of course be calculated.
