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History
Department Fall Meeting
August 25,
2016
HBC 411 at
7:00 p.m.
1. The
History Department welcomed its new
members: Bill Britcher, Aaron Fichera,
Kate Meyers, and
Storm Miller.
2. The usual
announcements concerning
checking rosters, turning in fall syllabi, watching for ADA
& SHT
compliance dates, and entering last date of attendance on
the final grade sheet
for students earning a “F” in classes.
3. This
semester all students certified as
“Never Attended” will automatically be withdrawn from the
course and will NOT
appear on the final grade sheet.
4. The
deadline date for grade submittal
for fall 2016 is Tuesday, December 20th, 2016,
rather than 24 hours
later as is normal. This is caused by the Christmas vacation
calendar.
5. Official
Reporting Dates for Fall
Roster Certification (Attended/Never Attended) are as
follows:
16 week
courses: Sept. 14 12 week courses: Oct. 6
1st
8 week courses: Sept. 6
2nd
8 week courses:
Oct. 31
5 week
courses: Sept. 1
6. The
Emeritus Professors Lecture will be
Oct. 15th in EVC 8500 at 9:00am
7. Constitution
Day is Sept. 27, 2016 at
Palmer Events Center at 5:30pm
8. Adjunct
Faculty Evaluation information
will be sent by email to all adjunct faculty members
9. The
Provost, Dr. Charles Cook, and the
S&BS Dean, Dr. Gaye Lynn Scott, made a presentation and
answered questions
concerning ACC’s participation in the Lumina OER Grant
process. The questions
and answers previously submitted are found at the end of the
Minutes. Provided
a satisfactory OER is produced and adopted by the History
Department, we will pilot
the HIST 1302 OER in the spring 2017 semester and the HIST
1301 ORS in the
summer 2017 session. If additional work needs to be
completed before adoption,
we will pilot the HIST 1302 OER in fall 2017 and HIST 1301
OER in the spring of
2018.
10.The
meeting adjourned.
OER
Degree
Initiative Questions from the History Department, August
2016
1. Do
I have to use
OER if I prefer using a textbook?
No.
We are excited by the possibilities of this grant,
including the
opportunity to move away from proprietary publishing control
over course
materials that we use.
Nonetheless
faculty may decide that they prefer the proprietary textbook
rather than the OER
course materials. We
must
acknowledge the likelihood, however, that over time, student
demand for OER
courses will grow. We
will only
respond with OER courses that are proven by the
department/program faculty to
result in the same or higher student learning outcomes (SLO)
as well as
persistence rates, and that reflect the same (or better)
quality of course
material to support student learning as current textbooks.
2. If
I try OER and
decide it doesn’t work with my teaching style, can I drop it
the next semester
and go back to a regular textbook?
Yes.
We see the availability of OER courses as opening the
door to greater
faculty control over their teaching, since the materials can
be adapted to an
individual faculty member’s needs.
We also see an opportunity for faculty to gain
additional authority over
their teaching style because they are not locked into a
publisher’s
textbook. However,
we know that
not all faculty members will like the adaptability of OER
course materials. We
invite faculty to take advantage of professional development
opportunities
where possible to learn more about the development and use
of OER.
3.
If I would
like to try to use OER, must I use the one developed in this
process or may I
change it to meet my needs?
The fundamental tenet of
the OER Degree
Initiative grant is that the OER developed for any course
under the grant will
be CC BY licensed
(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). CC BY licensing
means that the course
materials can be adapted, remixed, rearranged, or
embellished as the faculty
member chooses – as long as attribution is given to the
course developer. That
is the beauty of CC BY OER
courses– they are malleable to allow for maximum creativity
and timeliness of
content as the faculty member chooses.
4. May
I develop my
own OER using material of my own choice?
Yes. Development is different than adoption
or adaptation. Development
of OER materials from
scratch to meet the Creative Commons licensing expectations
is a large
undertaking. We
encourage faculty
to explore OER courses that are already developed (whether
on Lumen Learning’s
platform, Open Stax, Merlot.org, or elsewhere) and then
adapt those materials
to meet their needs. In
this
sense, development would mean to add, change, rearrange,
delete, or expand on
sections of a course that has already been developed with
OER materials.
5. Do
I have to use
only the “approved” OER material from Lumen or can I use
other “non-approved”
material of my own choosing?
Our partners in this
grant include Lumen
Learning (http://lumenlearning.com/). Lumen Learning
has a course catalog of
publicly licensed (CC BY) courses.
(Please note that the Lumina Foundation is not
involved in this grant.
Our partner is Lumen Learning. There seems to be
some conflation of
these two distinct entities.) The
grant asks that
courses developed or adapted for the OER Degree Initiative
go through a
licensing review by Lumen Learning to ensure that every
element of the course is
CC BY licensed.
While faculty developers
under the grant are
generally likely to start with a Lumen Learning course, that
does not mean that
the materials won’t be adapted, rearranged, added to, or
remixed to meet the
needs of our students and the learning outcomes established
for the course.
Further, the benefits of
OER serve both
faculty and student needs.
For
faculty, a CC BY licensed course can be altered to suit the
faculty member’s
particular needs and approaches to the subject matter. In addition,
faculty can engage
students in the ongoing creation of course materials – for
instance, an
assignment could ask students to search for publicly
licensed examples of a
particular phenomenon or concept.
For students, course materials that are CC BY
licensed are available on
the first day of class.
They
are accessible in multiple formats (electronic, print on
demand). They
are timely and often interactive. And they are inexpensive or free.
6. If
I decide not
to use OER but the ECS high school where I have taught for
years decides they
want to use it for financial reasons, will I be prohibited
from continuing to
teach there? What about my selection rights with e-staffing?
The type of course
scheduled and its
appropriate staffing must serve institutional and student
needs first and
foremost. To
every extent possible
beyond that, ACC also strives to serve the needs of its
faculty, both full-time
as well as adjunct, in obtaining a schedule that is most
convenient to their
needs and conducive to excellent teaching and learning
environments. In
addition, please remember that the
Administrative Rules related to adjunct staffing allow for
flexibility in the
staffing of dual credit sections in order to best serve the
needs of the
institution and the dual credit students.
(Please see AR 4.06.002.)
The high school districts
must, by law,
provide all textbooks for ECHS students.
To date our local early college high school partners
have spent between
$80,000 and $100,000 on textbooks for dual credit classes. Over time, as
proven OER courses are
available, it is conceivable that districts would indeed ask
for them over
non-OER courses. ACC
faculty
members control the content of the OER courses to ensure
that they facilitate
all ACC faculty-prescribed learning outcomes. To ensure the greatest flexibility for
both adjuncts and
department chairs in terms of eStaffing assignments, it
would seem to be
incumbent upon the faculty members to gain training in OER,
distance learning,
hybrid instruction, and all forms of course delivery that
ACC offers.
7. Will
I be kept
from teaching a certain section just because I don’t use
OER? What about the
concept of academic freedom?
Freedom of inquiry,
freedom to teach course
content, freedom to communicate sometimes difficult or
controversial ideas –
none of this is threatened by the development and use of
open educational
resources.
As a research partner in
the OER Degree
Initiative grant, we have agreed to help ensure that 300
students receive a
“dosage” of four OER-based courses in the next year and a
half. The
quasi-experimental research
design is available upon request.
We hope to concentrate our OER sections at regional
campuses (HLC, RRC, RVS)
for the research study.
In
addition, we hope to develop a coherent schedule at each of
those campuses that
makes it more likely that students who have declared General
Studies as their
program will take four or more classes that are OER based. Some of these
efforts may impact a
faculty member’s preference for a particular class at a
particular time. We
see the OER Degree Initiative grant
as a springboard for the development of additional OER
courses and for the
expansion of the number of faculty who teach OER courses.
The development of the
course schedule is
something that will be done more thoughtfully and
intentionally, separate and
apart from any conversation about OERs.
Too often our course schedules “roll” from one
semester to the next,
with a few changes made around the edges.
As a college we need to have serious conversations
about how we craft
our course schedule so as to best meet the needs of our
students.
We intend to explore
additional software to
assist us in the analysis and execution of course schedules
that serve our students’
needs. We
receive many complaints from
students who have to travel to multiple campuses at odd
times to complete a
schedule. We
will be working with
Deans and Department Chairs over the next year to design and
create
block-scheduled programs, week-end programs, fully online
programs, and
competency-based programs.
8. Will
certain
sections be reserved just for OER use?
Yes.
9. How
will OER
work with e-staffing?
As explained in response
to question 6
above, course scheduling and staffing must serve
institutional and students’
needs first and foremost.
However,
every effort will be made to continue use of a system that
recognizes faculty
status, service, and performance in shaping their own
teaching schedule.
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