The
Regular session –
office: Jacobson Faculty Hall 206
phone: 325-6789
e-mail:
The Faculty Senate was called
to order by Professor Aimee Franklin, Chair.
PRESENT: Apanasov,
Asojo, Atiquzzaman, Baer, Bass, Blank, Bradshaw, Buckley, Conlon, Cox-Fuenzalida,
Deacon, Eodice, Franklin, Gan, Grasse, Hahn, Jean-Marie, Kershen, Kimball,
Lauer-Flores, Lifschitz, Miller, Milton, Morrissey, Moses, Muraleetharan, Palmer,
Rogers, Russell, Sadler, J. Schmidt, R. Schmidt, Strauss, Tabb, Taylor, Trafalis,
Vehik, Verma, Weaver, Williams
Provost's office representative: Mergler
ABSENT: Ahmed,
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Announcements:
Faculty deaths
Search committee, Atmospheric & Geographic Sciences
dean
Interior Design honor
Remarks by Ghislain d’Humieres, director of the Fred Jones Jr. Museum
of Art
Research Council recommendation to revise the process for hiring
research faculty
Senate Chair's Report:
Photo rosters, registration
Wellness statistics
OU WiFi
Academic misconduct process
Plagiarism detection
Reporting grades
Online course evaluations
State regents issues
Retirement fund record keeper
Posting course materials to learn.ou.edu
Digital tenure dossier review
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The Faculty Senate Journal
for the regular session of
The Faculty Senate is sad to
report the deaths in October of retired faculty Cedomir Sliepcevich (Chemical
Engineering & Materials Science), Leale Streebin (Civil Engineering &
Environmental Science), and Lloyd Williams (Education) and of active faculty
member Roger Young (Geology & Geophysics).
The Faculty Senate
Prof. Asojo announced at the
meeting that OU’s Interior Design
program in the
Prof. d’Humieres said he
wanted to share the exciting things going on with the art museum. President Boren secured the Adkins Collection,
the largest private collection of Western and Native American art. It is being shared with the Philbrook Museum of
Art in
Provost Mergler asked about
other exhibits that were planned for 2010-11.
Prof. D’Humieres replied that fall 2011 will be the opening of the
Adkins collection, and spring 2012 will be works from the National Gallery. He may do an exhibit about history for
children, which will be at their eye level.
When he came here two years ago, only 2000 students were coming through
the museum in one year. Last fiscal year
the museum started communicating through Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and the web
site and had 10,000 students visit. He
wants 15,000 students to visit the museum at least one time a year. He asked the faculty members to help spread
the word around.
Prof. Miller asked whether
docents could be arranged for faculty who participate in the adopt-a-prof
program. Prof. D’Humieres said the
museum could provide docents anytime faculty members wanted to bring a group of
students for a visit. They could even
tailor the tour for the group. Prof. Rogers
asked if the museum offered programs such as summer day camps for younger
children. Prof. D’Humieres said the
museum does an exhibition during the summer.
This summer it will be photography, with a focus on traveling the
world. Each summer, about 2000 students
in
Prof. Franklin added that the
museum has been doing some partnerships with the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History
and is one of the trolley stops for the Second Friday night Circuit of Art.
According
to the OU Faculty Handbook, the Research Council is responsible for reviewing
Research Faculty candidates. The
Research Council voted unanimously to recommend that the Research Council be
replaced by the Vice President for Research for this approval process. The council believes there is enough
oversight in the process to remove the Research Council endorsement. (See http://www.ou.edu/admin/facsen/RC
Faculty Senate Letter.pdf and http://www.ou.edu/admin/facsen/request
to hire research professor.pdf.)
This modification would
require a change in Faculty Handbook,
section 3.5.3(A) (deletions crossed through; additions underlined):
“Once the academic unit has made a
recommendation and the academic dean has endorsed this recommendation, the
credentials of the candidate and the final recommendation to hire the candidate
for the research faculty position shall be reviewed by the Research Council
Vice President for Research, whose recommendation shall be forwarded to
the Senior Vice President and Provost for review prior to presentation to the
President and the Board of Regents. All
subsequent practices currently in place for temporary faculty appointments
would apply in these cases as well. Contractual documents shall state clearly
these appointments will not become tenure-track.”
This recommendation was
considered last month (see 10/09 senate journal). The Faculty Senate approved the
recommendation on a voice vote.
Last month, Prof. Strauss
asked about the iThink photo rosters. The
Faculty Senate
Breion Rollins, the new
wellness coordinator, held some wellness screenings in October for the Norman
campus, and 234 faculty and staff participated.
Over 2000 faculty and staff have been screened this year. The OU Weight Watchers at Work has 170
members on the Norman campus and over 250 across all three campuses. As of mid October, over 1000 total pounds had
been lost.
Individuals now have to
complete a copyright tutorial and quiz to register for access to the OU WiFi
wireless network and Housing wired networks.
In the coming months, some changes will be made in the wireless networks
available on campus.
A change has been made that
will impact faculty who file academic misconduct charges. If a student has hired an attorney from
outside OU, Legal Counsel will provide an attorney to the faculty member and to
the board. Additionally, the attorneys will
not be able to address the hearing board directly.
Related to misconduct, Turnitin
has been linked to the faculty’s drop box in learn.ou.edu so student
assignments can be checked automatically for plagiarism. A box allows faculty to enable plagiarism
detection and set parameters for the originality reports. The originality reports will be available in
the drop box in a short amount of time. Another
enhancement is an online markup through the drop box for adding comments or corrections. Several file types are compatible with
plagiarism detection and online markup, such as MS Word, WordPerfect,
PostScript, Acrobat PDF, HTML, RTF, and Plain Text. IT is looking at other ways to link up our
computing systems. Prof. Kershen asked
whether a summary was available of how to use the drop box to automatically
check for plagiarism. Prof. Franklin replied
that some information is available on the learn.ou.edu web site, and a summary
she prepared is available from the senate office. She said the tool is amazingly simple and
worked very nicely. For assistance with
this feature, contact Michelle Davis in IT at learn.ou.edu.
One of the items to be
resolved in the oZONE system is uploading grades at the end of the spring
semester. The vendor may be able to
offer a fix so that instructors will not have to upload grades into the Learn web
site and then into the grade web site. Nothing
will be settled on that issue until the spring semester because they are still
resolving registration issues.
Another change for spring
2010 is university-wide online course evaluations. Each college will retain its current
evaluation form. Last spring the College
of Arts & Sciences went to online evaluations and had a 59 percent response
rate. The evaluation window is the same
time as the paper evaluation and is a week long. Instructors and students will receive emails notifying
them about the evaluation window.
Instructors will receive a follow-up message mid week indicating the
response rate thus far and also a message at the end of the period telling the
final response rate. The quantitative
and qualitative evaluation feedback is expected to be sent to the instructor within
a couple of weeks. In spring 2009, the
qualitative comments were delayed, but that problem has been resolved. Overall, there was no statistically significant
difference in the scores between paper and online evaluations, although some
individual scores may have dropped and some may have increased. Prof. J. Schmidt asked whether the 59 percent
response rate was with or without the iPods.
Prof. Franklin explained that Arts & Sciences had a raffle last
spring and gave away some iPods for students that completed all of their course
evaluations. However, Provost Mergler
has discouraged individual professors from offering inducements, such as extra
credit, to students for filling out the evaluations.
On November 7, Prof. Franklin
went to the state regents’ office to attend the annual faculty assembly. The regents have a Faculty Advisory Council that
meets every month. OU has two
representatives, one from the Norman campus and one from the
Members of the senate
Prof. Franklin pointed out
that she wanted to have a discussion at this meeting about two issues of
interest to faculty and that affect the entire campus: posting course material to learn.ou.edu and
digital tenure review.
Background: In 2005, the Student Congress passed a resolution
requesting the posting of course syllabi and current grade information on
learn.ou.edu. After discussion, the
Faculty Senate approved a resolution stating: “Faculty Senate encourages faculty to make undergraduate course syllabi
available online.” On
Nearly 5 years later, we are
a campus that has long-term experience with learn.ou.edu, encourages green initiatives,
and employs alternate course delivery formats (especially with the advent of
absences caused by H1N1). In addition,
there is an emphasis on improving graduation rates and time to graduation and
increasing retention rates.
Should the current policy be revised to
reflect minimum expectations for faculty posting of course materials?
Prof. Franklin explained that
each class has a web site that is established through the Desire2Learn
system. The issue is what information
should be made available to students in electronic form. With the transfer to the oZONE system, the effort
to make our campus greener, the concern about providing course materials to
students in the event of a flu outbreak, and the resolution passed by Student
Congress, it seemed time to have a discussion to determine what the current
policy should be. In 2005, the Faculty
Senate encouraged faculty to make undergraduate course syllabi available online. The discussion at this meeting was to get a
sense of where we are and give senators an opportunity to talk with their
faculty colleagues. Prof. Eodice was
present and would be willing to describe the resources available in the Learning,
Teaching, Writing Program (formerly the
Prof. Eodice explained that
the Learning, Teaching, and Writing (LTW) program, which reports to the
provost, is a convergence of the technology and teaching elements of the
program for Instructional Innovation.
The initiative this fall has been teaching with technology. Fewer than 40 percent of faculty use
D2L. Some instructors only use the
online grade book; fewer than 37 percent are fully engaged with all the
potential of D2L. LTW has been offering lots
of opportunities to help faculty get materials on D2L quickly. One of the LTW goals is to bring everyone up
to a level of usability so students are provided with the information they need
in a course should there be an interruption.
Prof. Milton said he uses D2L
for grades and homework solutions but finds it more convenient to use his own
web page for most of the course materials, such as lecture notes. Prof. Eodice pointed out that D2L is more
intuitive now than it used to be, so it is a good time to look at it
again. There is a lot of support for using
the program. Prof. Franklin added that
the College of Arts & Sciences could upload course syllabi to D2L for the
faculty in that college. She was told the
library could do that as well. Prof. Miller
commented that faculty could save students a lot of money by uploading reading
materials. Provost Mergler remarked, “The
more we can make uniform where they go for access to materials, the better.” Faculty members have to weigh that against their
own personal convenience. We are here
for the students, and the assistance that is provided makes it easy to get the
course materials onto D2L.
Prof. Kershen said he uses
his own personal web page, too. He asked
whether there was a good reason why he should move to D2L. Prof. Eodice noted that the dean of
Prof. Miller remarked that
D2L works well for announcing research participation opportunities, and it has
increased participation in his department.
Students can go directly to the survey sites. Prof. Eodice said 300 incoming graduate
teaching assistants went through a training session on D2L during the
orientation in August, so they would be able to help faculty upload materials. Prof. Franklin pointed out that faculty members
will lose the course email function through iThink during the transition. They will have to communicate through the
email list in D2L. Prof. Vehik said her
department had created D2L permanent courses for faculty, graduate students and
undergraduate students, which allows them to maintain communication. It also is useful for posting job
opportunities. Prof. Franklin commented
that instructors can post resources and guides for research papers and hold
electronic office hours in a chat room.
She asked the senators to gather feedback from their faculty colleagues
so the Faculty Senate can decide whether it wants to take any course of action.
Background: Each year roughly 40-45 tenure dossiers are reviewed
by the Campus Tenure Committee. Added to
this are 10-15 promotion dossiers reviewed administratively. Currently departments prepare paper dossiers
for internal and external review. Seven
complete copies of the candidate’s dossier are required for internal
review. External review dossiers,
normally smaller, are estimated to require 6-12 paper copies of the candidate’s
dossier. In 2009, the review for Honors
and Awards was streamlined to require paperless submission for most dossiers.
Best practices research of
Big 12 schools and schools recognized in a recent Chronicle article suggests that technology has advanced to the
point where creating electronic dossiers is more efficient and that secure
submissions and reviews of digital dossiers can be assured. Digital submission could allow electronic
access for reviewers at any setting they choose and would greatly reduce the
amount of paper used, enhancing green campus initiatives.
Should the current policy be revised to
encourage electronic review of tenure and promotion dossiers?
Prof. Franklin described the stacks
of paper that are used for just one case file.
A recent article in the Chronicle
talked about some universities that are going to electronic review. The question is whether it would be possible
to have a more efficient, greener system that still is secure. Some privileged information is contained in
those documents, so we would have to make sure we have the same level of security
that we have now. We could start out
with internal review and move to external review. The Faculty Awards and Honors Council is trying
electronic submission this year.
Currently, at the end of the process, every dossier is scanned by the
provost office and kept on file. Digital
dossiers would be a way to have a more dynamic system. Instead of printing the electronic files that
already exist, they could be uploaded, similar to the FastLane process that NSF
uses for submission of proposals. Prof.
Franklin asked the senators for their reaction to the idea and to check with
their colleagues for suggestions and concerns.
Prof. Apanasov said it was
important to create safe files in a convenient way. Prof. Franklin said the options are wide open. At this stage, the objective is to see if
there is an interest and to imagine how we would do it. Some of the schools who have gone electronic developed
their own system, others used a course management system such as Blackboard or
D2L to upload the files, and some purchased a system.
Prof. Rogers said her main
concern was since there is a uniform standard, the dossiers should be scanned
in a central place instead of in department offices. Prof. Eodice said most of the programs skip
the scanning; all the materials are uploaded into a template. Prof. Apanasov noted that books cannot be uploaded
because of publisher objections, so it would not be possible to replace the
real thing. Prof. Franklin replied that
publishers might be able to provide an eBook in Kindle. She agreed that books would be an important
concern.
Prof. Gan commented that
tenure and promotion packages are very different from grant or award
packages. Some of the external review
letters may not be supportive, so security is a big concern. Prof. Franklin replied that initially those
letters could be scanned and made available electronically rather than having
the reviewers submit them electronically.
Prof. Milton remarked that everything he reviews is electronic. He said he thought the security issue was
solvable. However, some people have
trouble reading documents on computer screens. It would not be very green if individuals end
up printing all the pages. Prof. Franklin
suggested that the department could provide one paper copy. One concern is people who print documents and
leave them lying around. At present, the
Campus Tenure Committee has to review the dossiers in the Faculty Senate office
or carry them around. Kindle is making its
electronic reader available as a free download to a computer. If the materials are in the Kindle format,
the font can be enlarged. Prof. Vehik said
she just prepared a dossier for a tenure candidate in her department. Everything was in electronic form, then she had
to make paper copies. She would much
rather have it all electronic.
Prof. Muraleetharan said some
departments, such as the creative arts, would have different requirements. Prof. Franklin replied that one issue would
be what to do about non-electronic items.
Prof. Taylor said it was important to have a mechanism for making notes
on a digital copy. The Institutional
Review Board is going to an electronic system where everything is submitted in
an electronic template and only the people who are authorized have access to
the system. The materials would be more
organized if everything went into a digital slot. She said she thought there must be a way this
could be done securely. It makes sense
to go digital. Prof. Franklin said with
the great advances in technology, it is time to rethink the policy. The government has an application that allows
individuals to read materials on the screen but not download them or print
them. Prof. Muraleetharan asked whether we
were the last ones to think about this. Prof.
Franklin reported the progress at other Big 12 schools and said our campus
could be almost at the lead. The others
are very curious about our results and would like to find out what we do. She asked the senators to gather input for
more discussion at the December meeting.
The meeting adjourned at
____________________________________
Sonya Fallgatter, Administrative Coordinator
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Amy Bradshaw, Faculty Secretary