Announcements
- Program Review Annual Update – I sent an email with a revised draft of the annual update and a link to a survey collecting permission to upload it. Please respond by next Friday, Feb. 11).
- WLDC – Awhile ago, Brian Jukes sent an email with a link for a Canvas page that you can important into your course, advertising the WLDC. I also recommend following Cindi Sargent’s advice (she’s the Instructional Designer) of including a link and explanation to the WLDC on your assignments so that you’re offering “Just In Time” support. Remember that we’ve struggled a bit keeping the WLDC at a level of support we’d like, so pushing the WLDC helps both our students and the Center.
- Fall schedule – Walter is meeting with Jeremy today. I will meet with him shortly after that. More on this issue below, under “Low enrolled literature classes.”
- Virtual Happy Hour is back! Join us Fridays at 4:00. I email a link each Friday morning, so keep your eyes open for that.
- Post-meeting survey – As usual, a post-meeting survey should show up in your email. I welcome any feedback. (I should mention that, aside from considering the feedback myself, I pass along kudos and/or suggestions to the relevant people.
Library Announcements
Since Elena was here to talk about GE degrees anyway, she also made some announcements about the library:
- The library is available to schedule workshops for your classes. They can be offered face-to-face or online. They also make videos for specific classes (and faculty who have used them are able to reuse them in later classes).
- We have access to Digital Theater+, which has a video database that includes an extensive collection of films of plays as well as instructional materials for teaching those plays. Brian Jukes wrote about this in an email last semester (Date: Nov. 10, 2021, Subject: “Digital Theater+”). There’s a little complexity about logging in — for some reason, IT won’t get this on our Single-Sign-On thingy — so you may need to reach out for a little help to get your students (and yourself) access, but it’s a great resource and worth the effort.
- The library has Information Literacy modules that you can use for your students. They exist as standalone courses, but they’re also in the Commons, allowing you to import modules into your course.
These were highlights from the “Welcome from the Library” newsletter than we received in email last week. If you’d like more information, check out that email. (You can also contact Elena at eflacks@yccd.edu )
GE Arts and Humanities Degree Adoption
Elena explained (much better than I’ve been able to) what’s going on here. Let me try to capture it:
We have three General Education degrees, all of which have no “ownership.” This means that no one has taken the responsibility to keep them up to date. This means that there have been no revisions since the 1970s, resulting in degrees that include classes we haven’t offered for years, etc. Aside from being popular — 20 students earned the Arts and Humanities GE degree last year, for example — they serve other purposes for students, in particular for students transferring to UCs (they don’t accept Transfer Degrees), students seeking an AA for advancement at their job, athletes maintaining eligibility, and so on.
Elena and Lore (from the Curriculum Committee) were given authority to revise the degrees, at least to the extent of removing inactive courses. But they’re seeking a more long-term solution. And since the majority of classes in this degree are English classes, they’re asking the English Department to “adopt” the Arts and Humanities General Education degree.
This would entail two main functions:
- Revising the degree (removing inactive courses; removing or adding courses according to relevance)
- Assessing Program SLOs
Regarding #1: We’d have the authority to make decisions about which classes should or shouldn’t appear here. This should, of course, be done in collaboration with other departments. And it would need to go through the normal curriculum process, which would involve us submitting the degree to the committee as part of the approval process.
Since the degree is being revised this week (removing inactive courses), we would not technically have to deal with thus much for five years, when the next official curriculum review will be done. If we choose to do this, though, I’d advocate considering getting to work on it sooner.
Regarding #2: This is a little murkier because the college is still developing its PSLO processes. So far, PSLOs are linked to Course SLOs (or will be, once eLumen is up and running). But what we do with them — what kind of conversations are encouraged, and what kinds of decisions such conversations might lead to — is uncertain.
I confirmed that we would not be asked to write a Program Review for the degree. We would likely want to mention work we’re doing for the GE Degree in our program review — indeed, one of the “selling points” for us to do this is that we’d be allowed to report the A&H degrees earned as ours.
To wrap up: There are larger discussions going on about whether or not the GE degrees are a good thing or not. There are valid arguments on both sides.
But we’ve been asked to adopt the A&H GE Degree for as long as the GE Degree exists.
I will add, because it’s my blog, that I support this. I would like to see the degree turned into something meaningful, rather than “grab bag.” Carrie also expressed support, noting especially that she’d rather we be doing it than anyone else. (I agree with her on this, too: after all, most of the classes on the degree are ours….)
And Elena noted that we’re one of the few departments with a large enough roster to do the work — and that our example might help encourage other departments to adopt the other degrees.
I’m not sure what the next steps will be. I think I’ll point people to this blog, ask them to read it, and then open things up for a discussion online. If we want to discuss this in real time, I can devote part of the next meeting to it; either way, I’ll wrap up with a survey that lets us “vote,” so to speak, on the issue.
For everyone’s sake, but especially the Curriculum Committee’s sake, I want to avoid a long silence. So watch for an email…
Low enrolled literature classes (and related enrollment issues)
I can’t capture the whole discussion — for one thing, my part of the conversation was largely incoherent. But here are some decisions and/or thoughts that came out of the discussion:
- Brian Jukes is recommending that his two literature classes (Shakespeare, Intro to Brit) be offered online. (I think Shakespeare already was online)
- Kiara is going to talk to Brian Condrey about options for the new LGBTQ+ course. There are important reasons not simply to put it asynchronously online.
- I will contact Brian Condrey about Intro to Am.
- I will continue a push, begun by Brian C and James Gilbreath, to lower the Intro to Film caps, which somehow got up to 70 for each class. (As Carrie points out, this class fits same bill for graduation requirements as our other lit courses, and thus likely contributes to our low enrollment in those other lit courses.)
Walter is meeting with Jeremy tomorrow (Wed.). I’ve encouraged him to ask direct and specific questions about the college’s planning assumptions, as well as about our intentions regarding things like offering a range of times (evening? morning?), limits to online teaching load for full-time faculty, and so on. (It dawns on me that the new eligibility-to-teach-online requirements are supposed to kick in this Fall. That’s crazy….)
I’ll also pursue questions about hybrid teaching — what guidelines or limitations are there? Has the college/district already made decisions about what options are available?
I’ll wrap up with something that was important to me to realize I was concerned that moving lit classes online might be irreversible, but Brian J pointed out that they shouldn’t be. I’ll be framing discussions with Walter to emphasize the temporary nature of these decisions. And Carrie pointed out that we rush decisions that have long-term consequences while still under these enrollment/pandemic pressures.
If you were there and see that I missed something, or if you have any questions, please let me know.