Thursday, Oct. 28, 2004 FACTC meeting minutes FINAL DRAFT
Lake Washington Technical College
Room 305B 12:00-5PM
Jennifer Wu, North Seattle Phil Droke, Highline
Sybil Weber, Bellevue Tim Keely, Tacoma
George Neal, South Puget Sound Randy Nelson, South Seattle
Randy Givens, Clark College Bill Moore, SBCTC
Diane Pelletier, Green River Steve Byman, Lower Columbia
Mark Doerr, Spokane Falls Jason Clizer, Columbia Basin
Tom Affholter, Spokane Diana Knauf, Shoreline
Mike Dodge, Olympic Sue Bickley, Yakima
PLEASE NOTE: The Winter meeting will be held on 2/10 and 11 in Olympia at the State Board office.
12:00-12:45 Lunch - Thanks to Marie Willsey of LWTC for making the arrangements.
Last minute details for the Tools for Teaching II conference were covered.
1:00 Reports & Discussion
Secretary’s Report (Diana Knauf)
Minutes for May 13-14, 2004 were redistributed for review, one change was made and the minutes were approved with two abstentions.
Treasurer’s Report (Diane Pelletier)
Our balance in May was $6630.37. There were expenditures for the newsletter, website, and Tools for Teaching! Presenter ($400, $110.35, $50), but no deposits. The resulting balance is $6070.02. Revenues and expenditures for this year’s Tools for Teaching conference will be reported at the next meeting.
The group voted to approve a keynote speaker’s fee of $500 for this year, and then decide on a yearly basis what we might offer.
TO DO: Diane is in the process of currently billing the colleges for the year and will handle conference revenues and expenditures.
Vice-president for Membership (Tom Affholter)
Tom is unsure why some schools pay and do not send a representative. He would like to follow up in a creative way. It was discussed that some campuses have funding issues, and this leads to representatives who cannot attend, or to a lack of a representative at all.
TO DO: Diane will send a list to Tom for schools that have paid. Sue will send him the master list of the current representatives. Tom will follow up with schools that do not have representation.
We discussed who might be able to go to Instruction Commission to represent us and ask that all schools provide monetary support for representatives to FACTC. Bill will mention this issue because he is attending their meeting next week.
TO DO: Bill will mention the need for representatives to have funding and support to attend FACTC meetings. Bill will also let Sue know when and where the Winter meeting is so that she can arrange for someone to attend.
President (Sue Bickley)
Sue discussed the need for representatives to actually attend. If you will not be here, it is important to let her know. Sue has been busy coordinating the conference.
State Board of Community and Technical Colleges (Bill Moore)
Bill brought us a variety of issues from the State Board. The Instruction Commission is trying to revamp their meetings to fit with their work plan. Their agenda is organized around articulation, access and assessment. Bill will send us electronic copies of their work. He suggests that there are some issues that may be of interest to this group.
TO DO: All representatives read the Instruction Commission work plan to determine what areas would benefit from faculty (and FACTC) input).
Materials relating to Articulation and Transfer strategies were distributed. The DTA worked well for Humanities and Social Sciences, but not so well for the Sciences. They want to create agreements that make students “major-ready.” A K-16 group joint access oversight group is mentioned near the end of that document.
A list of the Workforce Education grants for 2003-2004 were distributed.
HEC Board project to help students transition to college translating readiness requirements into competencies: The transitional math project is almost completed and may be used as a model. There will be a place for faculty to be involved in that work.
Bill distributed an Executive summary report from ACT; it cites a lack of college readiness despite having completed high school. Students are not taking the right courses, and they are not taking the courses at the right time and thus are not prepared. Right now in Washington we do not have access to data to examine this problem, but we hope to move in that direction.
TRANSITIONAL
MATHEMATICS PROJECT – Bill distributed a working draft version of the
transitional math project (with participation by high schools, community and
technical colleges and four-year institutions).
The group
is also working on choosing sample problems to help delineate the standards.
Tim commented that the folks working on the project are diligent and committed.
People are eager to create clear expectations that are supported by all levels
of the systems. A 2nd summer institute will be in June with a focus
on good practices with regard to assessment of content and pedagogy. The
project is funded for another year through the state and the Gates Foundation.
The legislature hopes this will allow us to reduce the number of remedial
courses offered to recent high school graduates. 50% of students coming
straight from high school are taking remedial math – many people feel that that’s
too high and it is too expensive, both for the system and for the students..
Bill is currently completing a report to be given to the legislature about what the problems are, and how we might best solve them. One of the major issues is communication to students. One approach is to give the Asset test to high school juniors to allow them to take what they need in their senior year so that they will be more prepared. Once general standards are developed, grade level expectations will be created.
TO DO: Bill will send the associated worksheets electronically to all representatives for distribution. All Representatives need to request that as many faculty as possible provide informed feedback on the project.
FACTC Focus (Mark Doerr)
Mark has two articles right now, and he would like to do another statistics feature, which seemed to be popular last year. Mark is currently considering an early January deadline with the goal of both hard copies and an electronic version. Mark has the numbers for hard copies from last year. People might use the article Bill sent about the crisis in community colleges from the recent Chronicle.
TO DO: Mark will send a new call for papers with the current deadline. All representatives will distribute the call for papers on their campuses.
Website (Jason Clizer, Tom Affholter) Rosie is the student who has been updating the site. Tom and Jason will take over maintaining the site, but need to get the password from Rosie. The site design has been well received and will be maintained.
TO DO: Jason and Tom will obtain the password from Rosie and begin to maintain the site.
WAOL Advisory Committee (Jennifer Wu)
Jennifer and Diana K. are FACTC representatives to this group that meets monthly by conference call. The most recent development is the Homeland Security contract with Pierce College. You can see the website: http://www.pierce.ctc.edu/dpeterson/HomeSec/hotTopics.php
It is ready to go, but the federal government is delaying funding for continuation of the project after a year. The 5 existing courses are for First Responders, and it is expected that over 100,000 people will be taking the courses.
WAOL has revised its guidelines for handling student complaints and Jennifer distributed the current version of their resolution process for student complaints. The process should be of interest to faculty teaching for WAOL.
Newsletter – With Joe Safdie’s departure, we need new coordinators for the quarterly newsletter. All agreed that the newsletter is well received and should continue.
TO DO: Jason and Tom have agreed to take on the creation and distribution of the newsletter. Diana will assemble and edit campus reports, sending them on to Tom. All representatives send your campus reports to Diana (dknauf@shoreline.edu) by Friday, November 5th. The newsletter designer is Connie Cooper marchare@earthlink.net.
Common Course Numbering (Tim Keely)
Having an integrated advisory system makes movement and evaluation of transcripts easier from place to place. After consideration, the working group on common course numbering chose about 50-100 basic courses for inclusion in the numbering project. The UW now has transfer guides that allow someone to determine how their classes will transfer; you can locate them on the UW website.
The goal of this project is to bring people from various campuses together to choose one number for common courses across campuses. Student services groups are currently determining which courses should be involved.
Post-tenure review process (Jason Clizer)
Jason is part of a group on his campus to develop post-tenure review. If you have versions, it would be great if you could send information and copies to Jason.
TO DO: All representatives send current documentation on post-tenure review to Jason Clizer.
Complaint/grievance procedure re: student grades (Sue Bickley)
Sue brought
up a situation on her campus where a grade issue eventually went to a formal hearing
process with attorneys arguing for both sides. In the end, the decision went
in favor of the college and faculty member.ended up in court. Apparently
there was an issue distinguishing between a grade complaint and a grievance
about a faculty member. The VP of Instruction is going to improve
the associated
policy so that it does not happen again.
Other institutions might consider reviewing existing policies to be sure they
are clear.
College in the High School (Diana Knauf)
Shoreline has a couple of these agreements, but it was news to faculty and they have requested that she seek out information from other schools. There is a group, coordinated by Sally Lightner-Hansen (sp?), which is looking at the guidelines. There have been some discussions about issues relating to College in the High Schools and Running Start. It appears that Running Start and College in the High School actually capture two different populations, maintaining both programs may be mutually beneficial.
TO DO: Representatives will contact Diana directly with information about their school’s College in the High Schools program. dknauf@shoreline.edu
Draft minutes respectfully submitted by Diana Knauf, Secretary.
TO DO: All representatives present at the meeting, please review the minutes for accuracy and report any necessary changes and/or additions to Diana by Friday, Nov. 5th. A corrected version will be distributed the following week. All campus reports are also due to Diana on Nov. 5th. dknauf@shoreline.edu