Academic Council Minutes

ACADEMIC COUNCIL
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
3:30 p.m.
U237A

I. Department Chair and Provost Curtis Discussions
Thank you and welcome. New format beginning today. The first half hour will be q&a for the Provost and Chairpersons. The Deans will join us at 4:00.

Question on faculty loads and classifications. There is a new committee for workloads being formed. The question was posed on if we need a vision statement for faculty at the university. Teaching is first and foremost. Research is also important. Mentioned faculty is surprised the university does not support sabbaticals in terms of funding. Dean in the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences allocates monies for sabbaticals. Do we have a university wide fund that supports sabbaticals or is it college level? Funding comes from the college. Can the deans say no then if there isn’t funding available? The President approves all requests and then the monies come from the lecture fund. Provost Curtis has not encountered (a denial) yet. The lectureship dollars the Deans need are greater than the funds available and sabbatical needs. The College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences earmarks summer revenue share for sabbatical use. The Provost has ultimate control over lectureship dollars and the Deans can make their case with her. There are some various sources, but many have received mixed signals from CTL. Faculty would like to see the process streamlined and easier to access. The current system can get very complicated. A centralized process would make it more efficient. This is one way the university can support faculty research.

Wait lists - Extending the wait list period up to the add/drop period is a big positive and very productive. System now does it on a first come first serve basis. The questions that need to be answered are: What is the purpose, what is the criteria, who should be added? One of the things that might help would be for the students to have to go to advisors to be added to cut down on one student being on several different classes. Students shouldn't be on there unless they need that course to move effectively towards their completion of their program. Students should only be allowed on a wait list for a real, good reason. The lists change daily. Need chairs to spend time with your advisors to come up with what the wait list should do. Should students be allowed to enroll themselves? Need a wait list that is managed by someone. Priority wait list vs convenient wait list. It use to be priority by hours but has now been changed to first come first serve. May be advantageous to require the students meet with a faculty or program advisor. Students still don't know how to get on wait lists. The wait list is not self-evident.
Possibility would be a different wait list for major and one wait list for gen ed. Have major wait list advised with a different advisor. Need to define what is an appropriate reason to be on a wait list.

Provost Curtis asked how many concerns do chairs have from students that are held up because they cannot get the courses they need. Sometimes they delay graduation, sometimes they go somewhere else. When issues arise, chairs usually call and plead chair to chair. Sometimes there are physical limitations to class sizes. Do we need more advisor help, or identify part of each advisors time to deal with wait list (the deans said no). If students had to go through advisors then there would be far fewer students on the wait lists. The biggest challenge is those upper level students who do not register when they should. Economic issues are delaying enrollment even more. Lack of information or lack of penetration of information (not reading emails) exacerbate the situation. Students enroll or begin school at different times or semesters. International students pose their own challenges. There are traditional courses students tend to take, if we could identify them early enough and hold some slots open it may help. Or build two semester schedules for freshman during orientation. Imagine we have the resources we need and think through the wait list issues we face. This would be a big impact to retaining students. If we did require students to go through advisors, what kind of staffing would they need during those times? What would we be gaining with in person meetings for advisor? Could we do it with a text box on the wait list so students can input why they want on the wait list? “I need it to graduate” would not be specific enough. If you made the process much like an appeal process with your Degree audit and the courses highlighted.

II. Associate Provosts and Deans Join AC
A. Approval of Minutes from 9/11/2012
approved
B. Function and structure of AC meetings (Appendix 1)
feedback encouraged.

III. Questions on Written Reports
Provosts, Deans, Faculty Senate President, and others
no questions

IV. Information Items
A. PIP (Partners in Prevention) - Amy Kiger
(Director of violence and substance abuse) Email with data sent including information about a state wide coalition interested in health and safety of college students. Have data set available for chairs and your students. Subsets also available for analysis. Includes examples of some of the info collected. The survey has 270 items but branched so they do not take students very long. What motivates students to not drink or drink less? Top two answers were academic obligations the next day #1 and cost #2. Smoking prevalence numbers, marijuana use statistics, sources of stress, lots of topics covered. It is significantly higher statistically that our students would come to faculty for advice as compared to state wide average. Demographic information also collected. More information available through Amy Kiger

B. Student Satisfaction Inventory - Mike Grelle
Regularly given survey (product from Noel Levitz). Will be administering it via paper and pencil on MWF classes by distributing the survey during class time Monday and ask for it to be returned Wednesday. Not to be completed during class time. What week will this come? Right before Thanksgiving break. Trying to minimize the amount of class time impacted. Believe it will be the 10:00 class.

V. Discussion Items / Motions from the Executive Committee
Discussion: Wait lists (web page to be updated 10/4 with a couple changes)
Specific recommendations - prioritize the wait list, someone needs to designate who has the higher priority for someone to go into class. If we had a text box the student could list a reason. Need to know if this is a preference, or if it is holding them up and why. This would trigger another level of review. Since Banner automatically enrolls, if you have someone who needs to jump to the top of the list it would need to be done before the auto-populate takes over in Banner. In Harmon, chairs are responsible for the wait list. In other areas they require a student to fill our a slip and the chair meets with the faculty.

All for making students responsible and enrolling when they are suppose to, but think we are going to see a big influx in last minute pleas. What kind of supports and pressure will be put on the students? Can reserve wait list seats, the same as some do with seat caps. Since this is the first semester of the first on first off, please monitor the system and see how it works.

Have had two conversations. One on how to get on the wait list and one on how to get off the wait list. If we resolve how students get on the wait list, it would help answer how to get off the wait list. Having something on the front end with a human component, putting the onus on the student a little bit, probably makes more sense. Would it always have to be a face-to-face with an advisor? Could it be email or another form they could submit electronically? Don't think it would have to be f2f. Could verify their information electronically. Feels like the existing system is focused on the low priority, I want a different time as oppose to a high priority, I need this to graduate/for a prerequisite to stay on schedule to graduate. Sometimes we need to leave the students on the list for a little bit while we figure out the best way to solve their problem. The pressure comes from the appearance that we are not helping the students. For courses with multiple offerings, can the system stop the student from wait listing different times especially with courses that have labs attached? We don't have to put a wait list on the labs.

Email from program advisor to OP so they can put them on the wait list the same way they add students to classes seems the best solution. Then OPs would have the documentation they needed. How do we educate the students up front, and hit them with it 10 times?

Where is this going next? Provost Curtis hopes department chairs will go back and speak with their advisors to get a consensus. Please include College and Department advisors, so Gen Ed is not overlooked. Possible split- they take care of gen ed, we take care of Dept stuff. Some gen ed problems are a department issue. That will need to be worked out.

Speak to your advisor and send feedback to Odin before Exec Committee. General banner session coming up at the end of the month too so we can hear back what everyone else is doing.

Discussion: Promotional materials/website - Robin Krause, Kelly Waldram-Cramer, Courtney Niemuth
Introductions. Design and content services are free. Printing is still a cost. Have an online job request form. Short form gets you in the que. Couple primary charges, but #1 is strategic positioning. Chose Red marketing campaign is still big priority. Promotional items available on the website. Order online and they will deliver to your office. Link on University Relations website. Courtney Neimeth is the Web Coordinator. Kelly is Assistant Director for Marketing and Promotions.

Thank you for you and your team's professionalism. We have been utilizing their resources for print and web base and would also like to extend our thanks.

Are we reaching people with our chose red? We saw positive research through our orientation days. Found favorable web responses results, too. Sent out a survey to a sample of the UCM community. We have seen some chose red takeoffs in other towns. Undergraduate marketing - it has been a pretty effective spirit item on campus with current students as well.

Is there a plan for a new web page design? We have been making subtle changes to department web pages. We are geared primarily towards the undergrad student when they log in to the main site. Our customers do not see it as often as we do, so it's not the same old to them. Keeping up with spotlights. Added a photo of the week that captures something going on on campus. Have direct feed with facebook and Twitter. Built a social media dashboard. Live feeds and a list of social media outlets. Created covers for student use on facebook. Improvement needed on individual websites who right now are they responsibility of a faculty person. Is there any help that can be offered? How much can we customize?

If site is primarily geared to prospective students, we can help. We have been putting a very short request for information form on office or department sites. The number of stealth students we get, students we don’t hear of until they complete an application, this gives us some information on them.

We have 8-10 templates to chose from. There are some limits, but we think the design is pretty effective overall. Robin's office is very helpful in helping the "dept webmaster" in adding request for information.

Spotlights have been well received. Mimic the time-lines students are use to now. Changed the way photography works this summer, but the photographer mentioned he didn't have the filters and such he needs. Photographic services to departments are now free.

Athletics has there own marketing team. That is why they went to a dot com which is pretty normal. Releases them from More.net's requirements on advertising and such.

Have quite a bit of advertising on TV and radio in KC area. Advertising as far as Topeka, including Spanish language stations. Expanded to St. Louis area as well and plan on doing it again in spring.

Printing services - is the procedure still to submit to Printing Services for a bid and then look outside to see if we can find a significantly cheaper source? The center for print production is student centered now. They are looking at competitive pricing. Call Doug Koch to see if it is beyond their scope. They will outsource if needed.

To what extent does University Relations work with our t.v. station and other outlets to get the word out on events such as tonight’s. How do we promote better (programs, speakers, and activities)? Seems we are missing a big opportunity with our t.v. and radio stations.. There are a couple different ways departments can promote their events. YOUweekly, can put it on the UCM web calendar and let them know and they will put it on their facebook page and tweet about it (University Relations). Jeff Murphy and Mike Greife are in the news office in our office. When you submit the event there is a check box on if you want news coverage. Given enough time we can create a spotlight for the web and get it on the social media.

Adjourn