February 8, 2011
Senate Meeting Transcription
Claire Crutchley, chair: I call this meeting to order.
Good afternoon. I am Claire Crutchley, Chair of the University Senate. I welcome you to the February Senate meeting. Senate membership is 86 Senators. Could Senators and substitute senators please click A so we can get a count; a quorum requires 44 senators. A quorum has been established.
A short review of the rules of the Senate. Senators and substitutes for Senators, please sign in the back and get a clicker so you can vote. If you would like to speak about an issue, go to the microphone; state your name, whether you are a Senator and the unit you represent. The rules of the Senate require that senators be allowed to speak first; after all comments by Senators on an issue, guests are welcome to speak.
The first item on the agenda is approval of the minutes from the January meeting. Russ Muntifering posted the minutes and sent a link to all Senators. Are there any additions, changes, or deletions to these minutes? …. Hearing none, the minutes will stand as approved as written.
I now invite Dr. Gogue to come forward to present the President’s remarks.
Dr. Gogue, president: Thank you. It’s good to be with you today. Let me just start I want to congratulate the faculty. Over the weekend we had a student, his name is David Harris, he is in Chemical Engineering and he was awarded the Gates Cambridge Scholarship. I didn’t know very much about that but world wide they only give about 80 of those, 30 come from the United States and it is a very prestigious award for a student at Auburn. He will work on his master’s degree at Cambridge as soon as he finishes up here, I believe he is a senior at Auburn.
Second thing I want to mention to you is about ten days ago the new president at Tuskegee was installed, Dr. Rochon, a very nice man and certainly has extended his interest in seeing Auburn and Tuskegee where appropriate to interact and work together. So we are inviting him over along with several of his people to visit with us and we’ll spend time at Tuskegee. Dr. Rochon comes to Tuskegee from Purdue, his academic background is Xavier, Yale and MIT and has a very distinguished career in higher education. I think he is a person our campus would enjoy interacting with.
Third thing I want to mention is that the State will hold its legislative budget hearings this week, I believe they are on Thursday. All of the universities in the state will be in Montgomery and do presentations and primarily will respond to questions form the new legislature.
I wanted to mention that at our Board of Trustees meeting last Friday, governor Bentley attended the meeting and spoke to the group, did a very nice job. The major item of business was Drew Clark presented the NSSE data. I know that he presents it on an annual basis, but you really ought to be proud as faculty members, the numbers over the last…whenever they started…they’ve been remarkably changing in the positive direction, so we’re excited about that. I think everyone that heard the presentation was also excited.
I’d be happy to respond to questions. I know that we’re getting an unusual number of applications to Auburn, Dr. Large and groups are sitting I think tomorrow, we’re still under our same assumption that our freshman class should be around 4,100. We have to see where we are as they look at that tomorrow. Any questions for me? (pause) Thank you all for being here today.
Claire Crutchley, chair: Thank you Dr. Gogue.
There are many things happening at this time. One large thing is the QEP committee.
The QEP committee chaired by Sushil Bhavnani has been very hard at work. The committee is asking for your feedback (both faculty and staff) on what is most important to enhance Auburn University student learning. Please go to the survey and given your opinion. You can select listed topics and/or suggest other ideas.
The Ad Hoc PT committee has put together a series of progressive recommendations on the Promotion and Tenure process. There will be a forum for all faculty in one week, Tuesday, Feb 15 at 3PM in the Library auditorium. There will be a rough draft of the proposals available to faculty soon and a general announcement will go out. At the March Senate meeting we will bring this information to the Senate for information only and the proposals will come back to the Senate for a vote in April. The committee has worked very hard and hopefully you will anxious to see the progressive changes we have suggested. Please encourage faculty who are interested in the process to attend either of these and give feedback.
The Faculty Handbook Review committee is working on editing of the handbook at the same time, except the Promotion and Tenure chapter. Their first step is making the handbook a policy document with other information outside of the handbook. We also anticipate the draft of the policy document to come to Senate in the March meeting for information, no new policies just simply making the Handbook a policy document.
At the same time the Faculty Handbook Review Committee is working on specifying policies, the university is working on creating a searchable policy database. You will probably get an announcement about that. In the initial stage the Faculty Handbook as is will be put into the policy database as a policy, but as the committee works and makes the Handbook more policy oriented (each Policy separate), then they will be distinguished separately in the searchable policy database.
Senate and University committee signup is now open. I encourage you and your colleagues to please go to the Senate website and sign up for committees in which you have an interest. The Rules committee will staff committees this spring. Please sign up for committee membership by March 7. Specific committee needs were sent in an e-mail by Russ Muntifering; you do not need to check this before signing up, but you may not be chosen for a committee if you do not meet the needs. We will try to post this list of committee needs on the Senate Web site.
March 8 will be the Spring Faculty meeting, March 1 a week before will be the Senate meeting . The five days prior to the Spring Faculty meeting, there will be a vote on the new officers of the Senate (March 3-March 7). The voting is on the web page the same place as committee signup. Faculty will be sent an e-mail when voting opens. The candidates for President Elect are Constance Hendricks, Nursing and William Sauser, Management. The candidates for Secretary Elect are Michael Baginski, Electrical and Computer Engineering and Robin Jaffe, Theater. I thank the nominating committee who worked very hard and the nominees who were willing to be nominated.
Again, a few reminders about the Senate: All Senators, whether ex-officio or not, have a vote and should attend every Senate meeting. If you cannot attend, please send a substitute (who is not a sitting Senator); the substitute has full voting rights. Each Senator or substitute Senator should have already signed in and picked up a clicker to vote.
Are there any questions or comments?
The first action item is Rules Committee Nominations. Larry Crowley, Secretary Elect, will present this information.
Larry Crowley, secretary-elect: Good afternoon. There are 5 things that the Rules Committee does. It serves as the committee on committees, it is responsible for providing nominees to the president for university committees and to the Senate for all Senate standing committees, all questions concerning procedures and policies are first brought up to that committee, It ensures that all units are represented by duly elected senators, and it also makes periodic studies of the senate to make sure that it best serves the university. The makeup of this committee is the senate officers as well as 6 elected members from the senate.
The requirements for being elected to the Rules committee, you must be a member of the senate at the time you are elected, you cannot be part of the current Rules committee. The nominations are made in this meeting and the vote will be during the March meeting. There will be 3 new members elected in March.
I will turn it back over to Claire for nominations.
Claire Crutchley, chair: Nominations are now in order for the Rules Committee.
Wi-Suk Kwon, senator from Consumer Affairs: I would like to nominate Dr. James Witte from Education EFLT for this committee.
Claire Crutchley, chair: James Witte is nominated. Are there any other nominations?
Werner Bergen, senator Animal Science: I rise to nominate Dr. Fenny Dane, professor of Horticulture for the Rules Committee.
Claire Crutchley, chair: Fenny Dane is nominated. Are there any other nominations?
Paul Holley, senator from Building Science: I’d like to nominate Dr. Shea Tillman, senator from Industrial Design.
Claire Crutchley, chair: Shea Tillman is nominated. Are there any other nominations? If not the nominations are closed. We will vote on these in March. Thank you very much. [13:00]
The second action item is “Modification of the Undergraduate Distance Learning” policy and has been postponed from the January Senate meeting and this is a new version of the policy. DeWayne Searcy, chair of Academic Standards will present this policy.
DeWayne Searcy, chair of Academic Standards: You have gotten this new policy in advance. Really, two changes are going on here, at least from the old policy one major change. The first sentence in the old policy talked about tuition, we removed that sentence as tuition is not decided by the Senate, that’s for another issue. All we are trying to do here is let on-campus traditional students elect to take distance courses. The second major change is having an admissions policy for non-traditional distance students. Those are the 2 major changes that clean up some of the language.
Some of the changes from the current policy is removing some of the limitations on who can take courses and the amount of distance courses they can be taken. [14:28]
Claire Crutchley, chair: Since this is a recommendation from a Senate committee, the chair will entertain a motion to adopt from a senator.
Stuart Pope, senator from Nursing: I make a motion that we adopt this policy.
Claire Crutchley, chair: Since this is a recommendation from a Senate committee, a second is not required. At this time I open the floor for comments or questions.
Ruth Crocker, senator from History Department: I polled my colleagues. The 6 who responded were all very strongly opposed to these changes, saying that it would dilute the worth of an undergraduate Auburn degree and it would reduce us, as one said to the level of the University of Phoenix. No offense meant, well it is actually; they were opposed to it.
Claire Crutchley, chair: Are there other comments? We will now vote on the motion.
Check to make sure your clickers are turned on. All those in favor press A, all opposed press B. A=42, B=20 The motion passes. Thank you Dwayne.
The next item is a resolution from the Library Committee. Robert Kemppainen, Chair of the Library committee will present the resolution. [16:41]
Robert Kemppainen, Chair of the Library committee: Thank you Claire, good afternoon everybody. I’m Robert Kemppainen, Chair of the Library committee and I’m here to talk this afternoon about the state of the Libraries material budget. I’d like to thank the members of the committee who are listed here. Through our deliberations it became clear that we all agree to support the Libraries request for this extra funding that I’m going to present to you this afternoon.
By overview in terms of how we got to this point, about 2 years ago the committee learned that the Libraries needed to cut 5% from the materials budget. We also learned that the Libraries had not been filling positions and instead had been redirecting that money towards the materials budget. Finally we learned that the last few years, stimulus funds had been used to support the materials budget, but they will expire this year.
I want to discriminate in the Library in terms of its primary users being undergraduate students and we’ve all seen changes in the RBD Library, the Learning Commons, the Miller Writing Center, Study Partners, heavily used by undergraduate students. All of these changes have been funded by an endowment from a private corporation, EBSCO. So this is distinct from the materials budget, which is important to us as faculty and graduate students. The materials budget then is what is used to fund journals and books. The size of our materials budget and this is 2009–10 data and it’s pretty much exactly the same this fiscal year, about 5.7 million dollars. Now in terms of where that places our Library comparatively; one way to look at it is we are a member of the Association of Research Libraries or (ARL). ARL members are limited to research institutions Carnegie classification of high or very high research activity and who demonstrate a sustained institutional commitment to the Library over time this is 2007 data. If you look there are 114 members of ARL on ’07, our materials budget put us at 110. Also if you look at the staffing size, our staff size is about that same level. The point I’m trying to make from this slide is our materials budget is comparatively modest, it’s certainly not excessive. Many of these other member libraries, large research Libraries in the U.S. and Canada have medical schools and laws schools and whatever so the point I want to make is the materials budget is modest.
Now where does the money go to support the materials budget? About 90% of that 5.7 million goes to purchase of journals and a small slice to books, 10%. If you look at the money going to journals a little over half goes to packages: Elsevier, science direct package, 1.4 million dollars, Springer, Wiley packages. Those things use up a pretty good bit of that journals budget. Coming onto the committee one thing I was surprised to learn was the cost of some individual journals such as just “Nature” alone is over $12,000 a year. An important here is the inflationary cost, all journal go up about 5% a year. So if we look at where the 5.7 million dollars is coming from, and again 2009–10 and it’s pretty much exactly the same now in 2010–11 about 75% coming from state funds, 1.4 million from stimulus money, which is temporary and will expire this year. The stimulus money provided by the university is hugely helpful because it saved the Library from having to do another round of journal cuts this year.
The Library has as I learned over the course of these few years this deficit that is obvious and ongoing and one thing they have done to try to compensate for it is to not fill open positions and instead redirect that salary money towards the materials budget. If we compare the size of the staff; 1995 — 150; 2009 — 90, that’s a 60 positions drop, so overall a 40% drop, which is very significant. The Library says that at about 90 is about as far down as they can go to maintain their operation. They are right at their limit.
Other things that have been done by the Libraries and I was involved in this here in 2009–10, we cancelled 10% of the journal subscriptions that totaled up to 250 thousand dollars. I’d say close to cutting significant journals, I work in Vet Med–some of my colleagues when we were drawing the line at what journals to cut, some right on the bubble, people said “boy, I’d really hate to loose those they are really critical for my research or teaching.” So we were close at the 5% cut. Book expenditures were also pretty significantly decreased.
So where does that leave us now, where do things stand? Number one, the Library cannot reduce staff position any more to supplement the budget, two, inflation continues, journal subscription fees, packages, cost of packages goes up and books, and we’re left that the loss of stimulus funds this 20–25% loss of money just to put it in perspective I’m not saying that the Library would do this but that’s about what we pay for Science Direct which is a huge package. That’s how many dollars we are talking about.
So consequences of this drop would be a severe major loss in journal subscriptions if we cut 25%, obviously further reduction in book purchases, and as I see it I know sitting in my office and in my work I would make a lot more interlibrary loan requests. It’s a wonderful service but there is a delay in getting the articles, it’s not always successful and I don’t know that the Library could sustain that sort of an increase that might come about in terms of the cost to the Library and personnel and so on, but that’s what I think a lot of folks would do.
So what is needed and what are the committee and our resolution, what it brings us to…I’ve shown you the Libraries budget is already small or modest, number two they’ve cut and made changes and substantially cut resources especially personnel to help maintain the materials budget, but they are at the limit now. The Libraries request is for 1.5 million dollars increase in their materials budget per year, being immediate because the stimulus money is expiring and permanent it needs to be ongoing each year. Also their request is for a 5% increase that simply accounts for inflation.
Importantly when we put all this together, these steps will help maintain the status quo, it’s not a request to increase staff numbers or enhance the size of materials budget. These things again will just keep us at the status quo.
I will go ahead and read the resolution.
WHEREAS, All missions of the University rely on resources provided by the Libraries and;
WHEREAS, the Libraries’ materials budget (journals and books) has remained stable because the Library has redirected its internal resources towards its support and;
WHEREAS, without additional budgetary support, the Libraries will be forced to make further, more severe cuts in the material’s budget, Now, therefore;
BE IT RESOLVED that the Auburn University Senate supports the Libraries’ request for new permanent, ongoing funding to be used to support price increases in the materials budget and needed new research materials.
Claire Crutchley, chair: Since this is a recommendation from a Senate committee, the chair will entertain a motion to adopt from a senator.
Ellen Abell, senator, Human Development and Family Studies: I move to adopt the motion.
Claire Crutchley, chair: Since this is a recommendation from a Senate committee, a second is not required.
At this time I open the floor for comments. (no comments)
We will now vote on the motion.
Check to make sure your clickers are turned on. All those in favor press A, all opposed press B. A= 63, B=4. The motion passes, 94% yes and 6% no. Thank you.
The next items are the Academic calendars for the 2012–2013 and the 2013–2014 academic years. The chair of the calendar committee, Robin Jaffe, will present the calendars.
Robin Jaffe, chair of Calendar and Schedules: Good afternoon everyone. Today I would like to thank all of the members of Calendar and Scheduling committee for their hard work and time on creating the calendars for today’s presentation. I’d also like to thank Rod Turochy from Civil Engineering for pointing out that Thanksgiving of 2013 was the 4th week and not the 3rd week. And I’d also like to thank Tony Moss and Scott Bowling for pointing out that July 4 was on Friday instead of on Thursday of the 2014 calendar. It’s really good to see people are looking at our agenda and taking notice of this kind of stuff.
First I want to show the approved 2012–13 calendar, and if you remember because there has been some discussion about this that there was a resolution approved by the University Senate in October 6, 2009 about the way the calendars should be looked at. We went from a 75-day to a 70–73 day choice, also we had to make sure that there 7 days in between semesters and that there were 2 days after graduation. So this was something that was approved by the Senate and the calendar for 2012–13 was also approved by the Senate on Nov. 10, 2009.
The calendar committee would like to make some modifications to that calendar. Modification one would be to move the fall reading days to Dec. 1 & 2, this will allow the finals to move to Dec. 3–7 making it a Monday through a Friday. Then we can move the commencement to Dec. 10. The modification was prompted by discussions in the Calendar and Schedules Committee by a suggestion of the student representatives who felt that extra days were not needed and it allowed for earlier graduation and they could leave. The committee also felt that it conformed better with the present 2010–11 and the 2011–12 academic calendars.
The other modification that we wanted to make was to move the start date of the Spring 2013 calendar to Wednesday, January 9, 2013. This will move the last day of the semester to April 26, 2013 and then move the reading days to April 27 & 28, which are Saturday and Sunday. The modification was prompted by discussion in the Calendar and Schedules committee by information from Katie Lackey an academic advisor for the College of Human Sciences and the A&P representative on the committee. [31:35] The reasons were that the students are not allowed into housing until Saturday before the semester starts therefore they have no business days to handle any of a variety of matter from scheduling, financial aid, or any university related issues. Students often do not adjust their schedules until they are back on campus giving them at least one business day to handle this would decrease the amount of classes missed while they finalize their schedule. Students need to be on campus to get certain courses to start the next semester. The committee also felt that this also conformed better with the present 2001–11 and 2011–2012 academic calendars.
So the proposal stands as this for the 2012–13 calendar to adjust the modifications to move the reading days to Saturday/Sunday, have the final days go through the 3rd through the 7th and then have graduation for the fall on the 10th. Start day would be on the 9th moving the last day the 26th with reading days on the 27th and 28th. [33:07] These are just modifications to what has already been approved by the Senate.
The other calendar we’d like to propose today is our 2013–2014 this is now correctly posted on our Web site with the changes. Start date would be August 21 with the end date being December 6, reading for the fall term would be on the 7th and the 8th with finals the 9th through the 13th and then on the 16th would be graduation, leaving us 7 days for the Registrar’s office which ends on the 23rd. Beginning on Spring semester will be January 8, Martin Luther King’s birthday would be the 20th, spring break March 10 to March 14, last day of the semester giving us 72 days would be on April 25, 26th and 27th would be reading days, finals April 28 through May 2 and graduation May 5. Beginning of the summer full term would start on May 16. We cannot start any earlier than the 16th so that crunches us into the 24th day, this is different than we’ve done in the past there is no reading day because there aren’t enough days in the calendar to work with our format. We have the final day being on the June 24 of the first mini semester with finals being on the June 20 and 21. Second mini semester starting on June 23 going through to July 24 and that would give us 48 complete days for our full term with finals being on July 28, 29, and 30 and graduation on August 2. And that will give us time to begin again for the next semester.
I move that we accept the first calendar modifications at this time. [35:47]
Claire Crutchley, chair: Are there any comments or questions about the 2012–13 calendar?
(no Comments)
Claire Crutchley, chair: We will now vote on the 2012-2013 Calendar.
Check to make sure your clickers are turned on. All those in favor press A, all opposed press B. A=48, B=2. The motion passes.
Are there any additional comments on the 2013–2014 Calendar?
(no Comments)
Robin Jaffe: I’d like to move that we accept the 2013–2014 Calendar as presented
Claire Crutchley, chair: We will now vote on the 2013–2014 Calendar.
Check to make sure your clickers are turned on. All those in favor press A, all opposed press B. A=64, B=1. The motion passes.
The first information item is a presentation on online student evaluations. It will be presented by Kevin Phelps, Chair of the Teaching Effectiveness Committee. [39:37]
Kevin Phelps, chair of the Teaching Effectiveness Committee: Thank you and good afternoon. At the beginning of the academic year the Teaching Effectiveness Committee was tasked with the responsibility of replacing the existing University of Washington student evaluation product. So this is an interim report of where we have been, where we are now, and why we are where we are.
Background: The Provost’s Office will no longer support the use of the University of Washington course evaluation product. Initially the Provost’s Office had agreed to fun this on a 3-year trial period we are actually now in the 4th year and that has run out. In addition the administration of this product has proved to be quite burdensome and inefficient, so we have to find a replacement. The questions on that survey are copyrighted so we have to replace the questions as well.
The committee considered first the online evaluation process and compared that to the traditional paper and pencil process. We discussed the pros and cons and then the committee voted to move to an online evaluation process. Before I go into the pros and cons of the online evaluation process let’s review briefly the purpose of student evaluations to assist individual instructors in approving their own teaching to assist at academic administrators and counseling instructors about their teaching, to assist faculty in the overall educational value and effectiveness of a course, and of course as everybody realizes to provide input in judging the teaching component in the tenure promotion and salary determination. So that’s why we’re doing it or at least that’s why we believe we’re doing it.
Advantages of online evaluations: Time, certainly it frees up class time, you don’t have devote a period or part of a period to administering the paper and pencil evaluations. Students can complete the survey more quickly, it’s easy to press those radio buttons in addition free response questions can be typed in faster than by handwriting., and probably will use spell check so when they curse you out at least they’ll use proper English. Studies have shown that in fact the responses there are more of them, they are longer and more thoughtful. So that’s a plus. Processing is much faster and recording is almost immediate. Finally it frees up staff time in distributing and processing forms. Not only do they have to put out packages for each class then they have to take them in and get them processed, but even worse is on written responses staff have to transcribe the written responses onto typed pages. And this past December I happened to walk in to the front office of the math department and all the staff are busy typing away, not happy about it, and I mentioned that we might be going to an online system and they wouldn’t have to do that again and they literally jumped out of their chairs. It takes them a long time, days if not weeks to transcribe those, so there is a big savings right there.
Second one is flexibility: survey instruments can be easily customized for colleges, for departments, for faculty, for classes. You can have some questions for some classes and other questions for other classes. Different departments can customize them to get the best effect in terms of the information that they want. Adding, removing, changing questions is easy, you don’t like the question, you change it. You don’t like the wording, change it. It’s a matter of typing it in, there may have to be an approval process but basically it is very easy to add, remove, or change questions. [44:12]
Most of the products it’s fairly easy to generate and design comparative reports some of the things I’ve seen allow you to decide that you are going to compare the scores to this person in this course to other sections of that course only, or to only other core courses and give you more information about how those scores relate to more comparable course as opposed to what happens now which is where you get a department average/institution average which in my department doesn’t tell you very much since we teach everything from pre-calculus up through graduate courses.
Controlling access to data, most of the products have very granular control that you can specify which questions can be the result from which questions go to which people, plus which summaries go to which people so there is a lot of control over the information as one of the people I talked to said that some universities are actually byzantine in the way they have the responsibilities and they have to be prepared for all sorts of different structures.
Finally as costs. It obviously eliminates the cost of forms and scan sheets. As a department head I go into the bookstore to buy scan sheets, each one is cheep but when you have thousands of them it adds up and so that’s eliminated. Cost of administering, the time and effort, even the cost of software should be less. Increased use of evaluations is free. If you give student evaluations to all your classes in fall semester and then again do it in spring semester, you’ve basically doubled your cost if you use paper and pencil but with the online products it’s the same, you buy the product you use it all year long. As many times as you like so there is no cost in terms of increased use.
Sustainability, this actually came up. Obviously the university wants to move toward more sustainable operations and the feeling in the committee was that using paper and pencil was not very sustainable and we wanted to get rid of those. Another reason to moving to an online process is if you want to tailor the program, change a question as I say, there are marginal costs in terms of doing that with the online system, paper and pencil of course you have to reprint all of the forms and it is quite expensive.
Challenges, okay it’s not perfect, the first thing that comes to everybody’s mind is response rates. They do tend to be lower, however a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education points out, surveys that show that they tend to have the same results even though the numbers are lower. And they can be improved by reminders, sent e-mails, if they check blackboard or AU Access you can have pop-up that remind them, you can have promotions, you can communicate to the students, and we can use incentives some of which are benign and some of which are draconian. Both are used, I’ve been told of one university that charges a $25 fee if you don’t fill out the student evaluation. [47:58] That doesn’t seem so bad. Another one, University of Minnesota does not allow you to check your grades online if you haven’t filled it out, actually if 80% of the class has not filled out their student evaluations no one in that class can check their grades online. A little bit draconian, but if you really want to get those up you can, there are universities that get 80% response rates. It’s possible.
Response bias, there doesn’t seem to be much here. One report Claimed that the averages actually went up by a little bit another report at another university said they went down, so you get both and the results are somewhat mixed. The other challenge is that it is a change of culture. It’s going to require a different approach or thought by colleges and departments, and a big change by students to adjust to this new form. So those are some of the challenges.
Current status: online student evaluations actually are being used in the university by Veterinary Medicine, Pharmacy, and Nursing. The representatives from those colleges on our committee seem to be quite satisfied with the products. As of 2008, 23% of the colleges are using online surveys. We have identified two software products that we feel would be quite good, one is CoursEval which is being used by the college of Veterinary Medicine and the other is a product, Course Response from Digital Measures. We are already using one product of Digital Measures for faculty portfolios. So these are two that we’ve identified. At the end of the month February 23 we’re having a webinar by CourseEval and on the 24th we’re having a representative from Digital Measure to give a talk. If anybody is interested, seating is a little limited on those but we will try to squeeze anybody in who wants to attend.
Some of the references: James Groccia has given a very nice report on student evaluations in 2004 and I borrowed liberally from that. The Chronicle of Higher Education article that I mentioned, fewer of them but the same results 5/21/2010 v56 issue 36; there is an online article from Memphis that was very informative and I used some of that information and I used the web site for one of the products that gives a lot of information. That’s where we are. We are also working on questions. That process is slower and we are not as far along with that as we with identifying the products. [51:22]
Claire Crutchley, chair: Are there any questions or comments for the Teaching Effectiveness Committee?
Jim Witte, senator EFLT: Are these online evaluations appropriate for those course delivered by interactive television?
Kevin Phelps, chair of the Teaching Effectiveness Committee: Are you referring to online education or Distance Education?
Jim Witte, senator EFLT: No so far the evaluations you’ve referred to have been online evaluations. I’m referring to courses delivered by interactive television.
Kevin Phelps, chair of the Teaching Effectiveness Committee: They are based upon the students have to log into a site and fill out an evaluation on that course so I don’t see any reason why not, if they are doing it now, they should be able to do it with that as well.
Gwynedd Thomas, substitute senator for Yasser Gowayed in polymer and fiber engineering: I jotted down a few thoughts when I read through the introduction to this online and was probably the reason that my fine colleague cajoled and persuaded me to come for him today. First of all you did point out that one of the problems was participation and you mentioned that they would have to be positive or negative incentive for it. This troubles me for a couple of reasons. First of all one of the things that Provost Mazey’s been trying to do is create an equity in the tenure and promotion system to allow everybody to play from the same rule book. How do we know if we’ve got variations in participation in the pool of people who are participating that we’re getting the same quality of evaluation as if you know who’s in the class actually filling out these forms, and the second part of that is in a college such as Engineering where we have the American Engineering and Technology that has to evaluate us and give us our certification that we are qualified to be in engineering, this a really important part of their process to know whether or not the professors are adequate for the job and I’m not all that confident that we are getting the kind of feedback that we need from a system like this. [54:11]
Kevin Phelps, chair of the Teaching Effectiveness Committee: First you don’t have to have incentives. As I said colleges do use incentives, obviously you want to remind people with e-mails and other things like that. You have to say as I said indications are that normally response rates according to studies and in the Chronicle of Higher Education article points out that while response rates may be lower they are still as representative as paper and pencil. Of course the questions will be different than the University of Washington questionnaire, but otherwise studies say you should be getting the same results.
Ruth Crocker, senator, History department: Dr. Phelps you talked about, you said we would have a lot of control over the information provided by this measure. Who has the control over it, the faculty member, the department chair, the deans, the administration, I was not clear about that?
Kevin Phelps, chair of the Teaching Effectiveness Committee: You are talking about the uses of that and the process by which who gets to see what. Obviously that was a third charge to the committee. Currently there are in place uses or lists of who gets to see what information in terms of the provost and other things. Now within the college and within the department I would imagine, and that’s something that has to be decided, but that they would have to set up the process. The general idea is that the Teaching Effectiveness Committee would come up with a limited number of generic general questions, and then look to the colleges/departments, etc. to come up with additional and more pertinent questions and they would have control over who sees that.
Ruth Crocker, senator, History department: The control would remain in the Departments then?
Kevin Phelps, chair of the Teaching Effectiveness Committee: Yes, departments and colleges as I see it.
Tony Moss, senator biological sciences: Why do we have to buy anything at all? Why can’t we just build it in house here? Or is this much more complicated than I think?
Kevin Phelps, chair of the Teaching Effectiveness Committee: I’ll defer to Bliss (Bailey) on that one. We’ll consider anything that comes forward, both of these products were developed initially in-house, one at the University of Wisconsin Madison, and University of Buffalo developed another. So they did develop in-house but this was 10 years ago.
Bliss Bailey, OIT: We’ll pay for it either way. We will either pay for OIT staff time or we will pay for a commercial product. The advantage of the commercial products is that they have already dealt with a lot of different universities with a variety of different preferences in terms of how the data is protected and how the data is stored and distributed. So they already have something that we can get up and running very quickly. So there was a question on how much is it? It depends on the product. The pricing that we have looked at so far is about half of what we’ve seen from the University of Washington product.
Claire Crutchley, chair: Other questions or comments? Thank you.
Our second information item is a presentation on the National Survey of Student Engagement. It will be presented by Drew Clark, Director, Office of Institutional Research and Assessment.
Drew Clark, Director, Office of Institutional Research and Assessment: If I seems to leap from my seat it’s because I actually the only person on campus who goes to the loading dock at the Facilities Division when the IAS forms come in in the summer, uncrates them, breaks them up into department level orders, …so thank you. With the first semester that we did it my conference table actually bowed under the weight of 40 boxes of paper forms.
I want to make two brief announcements before I give the presentation. The first has to do with the Web site mentioned earlier for completing a brief survey to collect your ideas about Auburn’s Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) which is a mandatory part of our SACS reaffirmation. The Web site is simply auburn.edu/QEP, the survey will be live through tomorrow. It’s simply a means for the QEP exploratory committee to collect quick and non-committal feedback from a variety of users: students, faculty, staff, alumni, or anybody who wants to put in an idea. This will be followed by a formal call for concept papers that will be coming out on February 18. Those concept papers are due March 8, and the best of those perhaps in combination with some merging or arm twisting will be invited for a subsequent round of full development. I do want to clarify one point of potential confusion in some of the communication that has already gone out. You may have seen notice of an amount of up to $1,500, that is not the budget for the entire QEP, that is a $1,500 per proposal development stipend for those projects that pass the first round of review, so I encourage you to apply your thoughts to this. It can be an exciting project for Auburn and as I am about to show you there are plenty of areas for us to work on. [1:00:51]
Thank you. Over the weekend I was involved in a fairly earnest conversation with a local parent about a very talented high school senior who faces a delicious but agonizing choice. She’s been admitted to the school she most wants to attend which is a private institution in New Orleans, but she’s also received a really eye-popping package from a competing state institution in this state and the parent turned to be because she knows I’m in the business and says, what should she do? So you all work in the industry, what would you do? Or what would you tell the parent? What I told her is that it really depends on how your daughter wants to do college. That if she wants to do college in a certain way she can have a great experience at just about any institution she enrolls in. So what I’m going to talk about today is what we know about how Auburn students do college. The National Survey of Student Engagement, which began in 2000 is the major study of higher education in this generation. It is a measure of how students do college in relationship to certain activities and values that we know work to produce a good college graduate no matter what choice they make about what front door to go in. It is an 85-question survey administered to large random samples of freshmen and seniors. It’s administered in spring term so the freshman has one term under their belt. And on our campus the large random survey was in fact the whole population of freshmen and seniors. We’ve been participating since 2002 our results are robust and trustworthy.
The 85 questions roll up into 5 benchmarks. Sort of broad categories of educational practices or values. The 5 categories starting from the top are: level of academic challenge, followed by active and collaborative learning, student/faculty interaction, enriching educational experiences (an example would be having to include an opportunity to have discussions with diverse other people, it would include study abroad, foreign language study, a senior experience-internships and so on. And then finally the benchmark for the supportive campus environment which is the measure of the quality of relationship students enjoy with other students, with faculty members, with staff and a measure of the way in which the environment supports their academic and non-academic attainment.
So that’s what the survey is designed to measure. It measures it pretty well and I want to give you quickly an overview on our results. First of all you have to understand the possible frames of reference for these scores which are numerical and hence fairly abstract. I’m going to show you in a moment how we stack up against a mythical 100 percent score. And just to help you calibrate that, to score 100 on the NSSE on any of the benchmarks would mean that the average student value for your campus was the maximum value for every question included in the benchmark. In other words every student would have to choose the most fully engaged level of participation to get it. No school in creation comes anywhere close to a score of 100. We can also scale the scores so that we compare our results with those of the best actually achieved results nationally, irrespective of institutional type and I’ll show you that, we’ll call it the top 10%. We can compare ourselves against other universities that are like Auburn, those in our Carnegie class and finally of course we can compare our performance against our prior performance. So these are the 4 frames of reference. I am going to move very quickly. A lot of this information is on the Web site for the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment. And I would be delighted, more delighted than the swap from paper forms to come talk to you about it.
These are our raw benchmark scores for the 5 benchmarks over freshmen and seniors from last year. On an academic challenge the score was a 52 for freshmen against perfection, 55 for seniors. Active learning 42 for freshmen, 52 for seniors; student/faculty interaction 34 for freshmen, 44 seniors; enriching experiences 30 for freshmen, 42 for seniors, and that’s partly an artifact of the fact seniors have more time to have these experiences; finally on supportive campus and environment which you’ll quickly see is our best score, it is indeed most anybody’s best score strong scores for both freshmen and seniors.
This is how the same data can be mapped against perfection for freshmen. Here it’s probably more important to pay attention to the shape than it is to the actual values, but what this shows us is that the first of these benchmarks to begin to have an effect on our freshmen is the supportive campus environment, a score of 66. Second most active for them is the level of academic challenge followed by the other benchmarks.
I’m going to move on and show you the comparable shape for our seniors and I’d invite you pay attention to the lower left hand corner of the polygon. Most of the benchmark scores don’t move very much between the freshman and the senior year and that by itself is probably a topic of conversation, but the benchmark for enriching experiences does broaden out as seniors develop more experiences. We still have plenty of things we can work on. Let’s remember that on this survey we always know what direction we want the results to trend in. There’s not a question of which way we want the results to go.
Now I’m going to show you the same data versus actually achieved reality. Same data now rescaled so it’s a percentage of the score achieved by the top 10% in the country on each benchmark. Basically what this shows for our freshmen the engagement scores if we can put it on a common grading scale are in the B to A- range versus the best performers in the country. And I do need to add that this is irrespective of institutional type, it may be small liberal arts colleges, it may be large institutions like us, religious, or non-religious and so on. So it looks better than it does against perfection, but there are still edges of this that we have room to work on. Notice that the corner in the lower right for student/faculty interaction is relative to what’s being achieved at the best schools a little bit lower here than the other benchmarks so that’s an area that we might choose to work on.
Here is the same kind of display for our senior scores. Again these are scores that you might say are in the B range for enriching experiences, study abroad, I mentioned these before, here what we are seeing is our seniors have fewer of those experiences and if we got down to the item level we would see that for some of the items in question they have many fewer experiences because some of our scores are actually above average on this one. For example, volunteer in the community.
Finally we can compare against our Carnegie Class and just a reminder we belong to the Carnegie classification of research universities with a high level of research activity. For NSSE we mushed that together with the universities that have a very high level of research activity. Here is a representative sample of the 61 that actually participated in 2010. So you get some sense of who we are measuring against. [1:09:15] Measurement is always tough in benchmarking against peer groups because it kind of depends on what the purpose of the benchmark is, but I think you might agree with me that these are relatively good benchmarks for Auburn on undergraduate experience.
So to move pretty quickly, Auburn showed no difference for freshmen from our peer group on three of the five benchmarks. On the benchmark for academic challenge we’re behind the average of the peer group. I can tell you in this room that is coming from the items for the amount of reading assigned and the number of papers written. It’s particularly acute at the freshmen level where they are writing many fewer short papers than are their peers at similar institutions. So that’s what we can work on at the freshmen level. Over on the supportive campus environment our scores are statistically and meaningfully above the peer group average. This is an institutional strength and we need to preserve it. This is the same display for seniors here, the differences are all statistically significant, but modest in size. On academic challenge there were still reporting less reading and writing somewhat fewer hours studying than their peers, active learning our seniors actually moved ahead of the peer group slightly, similarly for student/faculty interaction. Supportive campus environment remains strong. You may have noticed that the freshmen score on that benchmark is actually higher than the seniors and if that seems counter intuitive to you I just ask you to think back to your own senior year and I hope you loved the place you went, but you were probably ready to leave. The decline in that score is typical.
Finally I’m going to show you the historic trends on this. We’ve been giving this survey every year since 2002, so we have robust trend data. This by the way also allows us to develop one new report that I will mention very briefly at the end. So here are the trends for academic challenge over the last 5 administrations of this survey. Again I’m just plotting the benchmarks scores, it is very abstract and we need to dig down. For seniors we see an increase, an improvement in the level of academic challenge, that means more reading, more writing, more papers, more academic work. Freshmen improvement has been even stronger over the last 5 years, that’s a positive development. Here’s one item that’s part of that benchmark. The number of hours they report they spend preparing for class. I’m not calling this great news, but it is an improvement. The first year of this time series the freshmen reported on average 11 hours a week on their studies, that has risen fairly sharply in the last couple of years now the reported levels are identical for freshmen and seniors at 14 hours a week. There’s room to grow.
On active learning there’ve been no strong changes in the senior level performance which is good relative to the nation over 5 years. On a positive trend an area where we really can make progress is active learning practices are increasing at the freshmen level and if we unpack that a little bit we find out that rates of service learning in courses have increased to above national levels now, while a persistent nagging problem for us, the rate at which freshmen don’t make class presentations is still a problem. They are still well behind their peers on the rate of doing that.
For student/faculty interactions is still strong at the senior level, but unchanged over 5 years. We are seeing slightly higher levels of this for freshmen, which is good. On enriching experiences basically the same story, seniors unchanged, for freshmen steady improvement over 5 years. Finally on supportive campus environment I want to pause over this for a second. Here the orange line, which represents freshmen is above the green line, which represents seniors and goes back to the point I made before, relatively stable at seniors and a noticeable improvement for freshmen. You know that since fall 2007 we’ve been admitting increasingly brighter and brighter classes. All you have to do is plot the mean ACT score of the freshmen class so that now the average score is about where the top quartile value was 4 or 5 years ago. This could present a problem for the supportive campus environment benchmark if such students don’t find themselves supported when they’re here. The good news is we’ve been able to raise the freshmen class profile while simultaneously raising the supportive campus environment score for freshmen. So that’s real good news.
Main takeaways are that our freshmen are becoming more studious, you can spin that term the way you like. And they are becoming more active learners. As I mentioned our campus has become even more supportive of freshmen at the same time we are increasing the class profile. There is still plenty of work to do. In order to help colleges work on that, my office has developed a report that will allow you to show your own college students benchmark scores against the means for Auburn. And we will be discussing that with the deans shortly. A pilot version of that was distributed a year or two ago. It’s a rough instrument but it may help you to identify patterns of strengths and weaknesses inside your college.
I’ll stop there, but I’ll be happy to field any questions.
Claire Crutchley, chair: Are there any questions or comments for Drew?
(No Comments)
That is the last item on the agenda.
Does anybody have any unfinished business? New business?
If there is no other business, then the meeting is now adjourned. Be sure to return the clickers on your way out. Thank you.