CIS meeting • 2020-01-22
The meeting was called to order at 10:06am.
Stef Woods (former Chair, non-voting), Brian Yates (CAS, Vice-Chair), Rueben Jacobsen (SOE), Stefan Kramer (University Library), Mauro Tiso (CAS), Alan Isaac (CAS), Kiho Kim (CTRL, ex officio non-voting), PTJ (SIS, note-taker), Rick Semiatin (SPEX), Joseph Mortati (KSB), Jennifer Gumbrewicz (SPA), Terry Fernández (OIT, ex officio non-voting), Nancy Davenport (University Librarian, ex officio non-voting)
The committee had no objections to Stef leading the meeting.
Rick moved, Joseph seconded, the approval of the minutes of the last meeting, with one minor spelling amendment.
Bylaws have been approved by the Committee, but then it then goes to the Faculty Senate EC; some discussion about how leadership changes, and whether someone newly on the Committee would be ready to take over the Chair position if the Chair had to resign. “Staggered terms” are the key thing that the Senate requires, both for members and for leadership. Length of service term on the committee set by whom: major teaching unit? Deans? VP for Academic Affairs? Also people have different contracts, so requiring that a V- Chair accede to the Chair position discriminates against those on 1-year contracts. On the other hand, the Senate liked the rotating model. Maybe we don’t need formal rules on this? Amendment to the bylaws to say that the V-Chair will serve as Chair if willing and able, and not making this a fixed and absolute requirement:
The committee elects, from among its faculty members in the first year of their term, one member to serve as Vice-Chair. The following year, if willing and able, the Vice-Chair will serve as Chair. If the Chair or Vice-Chair can no longer serve in that role, the committee will elect, from among its faculty members, a new Chair and/or Vice-Chair for the remainder of the academic year.
Amendment passed with general acclamation.
Election of new officers. Brian to be Chair, Mauro to be Vice-Chair, for Spring 2020. [Note that Brian, having been elected Vice Chair for AY 2019-2020, automatically accedes to Chair for AY 2020-2021, unless he is no longer “willing and able.”] Alan moves the slate, PTJ seconds, approved with 2 abstentions (the candidates themselves).
Mike Piller working on online learning stuff, under the auspices of the Provost’s office. There will also need to be a faculty rep on the university’s enterprise systems committee. Some discussion of the scheduling and responsibilities; apparently there is always lunch provided. Interested committee members should contact Brian directly.
IP grades have been changed, now changing IP requires a change of grade form. That’s been resolved, IP is gone, now there’s just Incomplete. Some discussion of whether the IP grade served a useful function, especially for grad students. Maybe SP/UP take that place? PTJ will ask OUR whether the IP grade is entirely gone, or what. It’s still in the regs. Why are only some courses IP-eligible, and who decides that?
FARS alternatives. Possible pilots in 2020, possible use also in the reappointment file process overseen by Mary Clark’s office. Symplectic is being considered. Whatever system we get has to be rolled out properly, since to make a system like this work requires changes in practice and process. We need to eliminate rework and retyping, so automatically harvesting data from FARS and from other sources (like Google Scholar) would be important as well.
Rick reported on DACA implications of photo rosters. Seems like it’s okay if the photos are used only by instructors in the class, even though the university gives no official answer related to DACA. Even students who opt out of directory information have to have a working e-mail address that is known to instructors in the class. Currently no photos in Blackboard, because of bottlenecks as students add and drop classes, but also some gap between the OneCard office and OIT, and a bug in Blackboard which has yet to be fixed…no information about when it will be fixed…Also, no communication from Blackboard about this to the faculty, except a notice posted on the Blackboard login page which many people may have missed. Joseph will contact Scott Vanek to find out what is going on, and to encourage communication with faculty about it.
Brian, reporting on Recruit: needs to be reinstalled. Disasters this year are worse than disasters last year. Workarounds are being created on the fly, and in the past people could download PDF versions of applications for evaluation. There is a need to get everyone together across campus who uses Recruit, so that all the issues can be clearly presented. Currently using three Ellucian systems: Recruit, Advise, and Advance. General faculty dissatisfaction with Recruit for being clutzy, hard to work with, and improperly configured for admissions filtering/screening processes rather than the marketing tasks of tracking prospects. Brian will reach out to everyone on campus who uses Recruit, or use his judgment on who precisely from different programs to reach out to. It was also suggested that we include offices in UEAS that use Recruit too.
LMS. There is an offer out for a new COO. The assumption is that we need a new COO in place in order to move ahead on the LMS switch, but that process remains unclear. Some discussion on timeline. Possibly to be completed by 2022…definite need to run systems in parallel for some time. We need to start the transition as early as possible. Committee should reach out to Mike Pillar to a future meeting to discuss this; Brian will draft a letter. Running multiple systems might produce some confusion for students and faculty, but we see no real way around this. Some faculty don’t give a lot of feedback on student work through the LMS, which is not really a technical problem — although there are some technical barriers that a new LMS could solve. Microsoft Teams? Nope. Default to POLS (plain old listserv) for committee communications for the moment.
There will be further e-mails. Meeting adjourned 11:34am.