The Faculty Senate untabled the recommendations provided by the Distance Learning Committee during their Apr. 19 meeting. The senate tabled the discussion at their Apr. 4 meeting over wording regarding capping online class sizes. Some senators worried about unintended consequences from approving the recommendations.
Faculty Senate Vice President James Ayers felt the crux of the issue involved compensation for online classes.
“There’s an end where you teach at,” Ayers said, referring to a class size limit where the quality of teaching will decrease. He argued that paying professors to teach class sizes larger than that which would allow quality education was not following best practices.
Kinesiology Senator Elizabeth Sharp engaged in debate with Ayers about the amount of work that goes into online courses per student.
Ayers acknowledged the amount of work that can be applied per student and used it to back his point that there is a limit to the amount of students any professor can teach. “There just aren’t enough minutes in the day,” Ayers said.
Faculty Senate President Josh Butler reminded the senate that the recommendations supplied by the DLC were not policy that would go before the board of trustees.
“This more like interpretive guidance, maybe, where we have a document that says ‘this is what we feel like is the best way to go about stuff,”Butler said. “It allows us the flexibility to come back in a couple of years and say ‘well that not have gone so well,’ or ‘that was great, let’s keep going with that,’ so there’s much more flexibility in there.”
The senate passed the DLC recommendations along with amendments about compensation, class overloads and placing an emphasis for offering classes to on-campus faculty prior to farming courses out.
In other action:
Associated Student Government President Ben Linzey delivered his final ASG report to the Faculty Senate. Linzey graduates at the end of the semester and will be replaced by Beau Flores, who won the recent ASG election for president.
Linzey announced the effort to change the official school color from maroon to Mavroon. He told the senate it was just a name change, not a color change. Linzey said the decision hinged upon the trustee meeting taking place on Apr 20.
“I’ve heard it’s childish, that it’s also unique and awesome,” Linzey said. He stated there had been a wide range of responses to the idea but students were mostly supportive of the change.
Linzey also announced Michael Bennet had confirmed to speak at the upcoming graduation and reminded the senators the Mav Awards are going to take place on Apr. 29. Linzey said they received 300 nominations this year.
Vice President of Academic Affairs Cynthia Pemberton informed the senate the Handbook Committee is meeting next week and they had a lot of feedback coming in from faculty. Pemberton also announced the addition of flags representing the homelands of international students at the upcoming commencement.
