Senate Forums

Purpose:
This forum is intended to provide members of the UC Santa Cruz Academic Senate an opportunity to discuss modalities of instruction and program governance. This forum is envisioned as part of an ongoing discussion, where all faculty (including department, program, and Senate committee leaders) can talk about the current states of our varied curricula, and how they may change in the future. Resources including space, funding, student preferences, and instructor and teaching assistant availability (to name a few) are all important drivers of curricular planning, but it is our intention to focus during the forum on high-level topics to (a) help develop a common vision for use of different teaching modalities at UCSC, and (b) understand the roles of the Senate in managing teaching modalities as part of oversight of courses and degrees. The campus is rich with expertise in pedagogy and novel ways of using technology. Future events will focus on these issues and we intend them to draw from a broader base of participation including administrative partners.

Questions:

• What is the Senate’s vision for high-quality teaching across a broad range of disciplines and levels at UCSC?
  • What is the role of the Senate in helping to achieve this vision?
• A big part of modality discussions to date has been maintenance of equality between in person and online courses. Should that be challenged?
• To what extent should programs be encouraged to incorporate alternatives to in-person modalities in their curricula?
  • What curricular flexibility is possible while maintaining UC quality?
  • For programs that have embraced multiple modalities – should there be a trigger point at which there is additional programmatic review?
• The course modalities a student enrolls in may be dictated by the schedule of classes and their personal preferences/learning style.
  • What proportion of a student’s major/degree courses can be online?
• Support for Programs
  • What resources are needed by programs and faculty to accomplish goals in offering a mixed-modality curriculum? How does this match with what is available?
  • What infrastructure assistance do individual programs need?
• Can/should UC Santa Cruz create additional flexibility by generating more modes of curricular modalities like some other campuses (e.g. SJSU 9 modes)?

The last three years have resulted in many of us reconsidering how we teach and engage students.  Emergencies including pandemics, wildfire, and storms have required that we make rapid changes and innovate, both within individual courses and for degree programs. As we move forward, however, we need to have larger and more philosophical conversations about the multiple instructional modalities on which our disciplines rely, including but not limited to: in person, labs, field, global seminars, hybrid synchronous and asynchronous, and online. This conversation, and the concerns and feedback raised by our colleagues, will guide Senate oversight of course modalities and curricular planning.

This forum will combine overviews and background information (provided in the form of “flash talks” by Senate committee members), and will be followed by open discussion. This work will benefit from broad participation and multiple perspectives. We hope you will attend and participate, bringing a wide range of questions, concerns, and ideas.

Agenda:
Moderators:  Elizabeth Abrams (Writing Program)
                     Andy Fisher (Earth and Planetary Sciences)
Flash Talks:  David Cuthbert, CEP Chair (Performance, Play and Design)
                     David Harrison, CCI Chair (Computer Science and Engineering)Welcome by Moderators   (3:00pm)

• Framing of the discussion
• Format of the forum

‘Flash Talks’                        (3:10pm)

1. governance: who has decision making authority about course and program modality
2. explanation of currently available modalities
3. a high level review of how online courses (and UG degrees) have been discussed systemwide and on our campus
4. current state of course approval at UCSC
5. motivation and preferences of students, TAs, and instructors

Q&A re: Flash Talks           (3:20pm)
Open Forum                        (3:40pm)

The Future of Online Course Evaluations at UCSC

A Conversation About Changes in How Students will Evaluate our Teaching

Wednesday, April 19, from 2:30 to 5:00 at Stevenson Event Center

Major changes are now underway for student evaluations of teaching (SETs) at UCSC. The campus is moving to a new online course evaluation system, expected to roll out in fall 2017. In partnership with the Committee on Affirmative Action & Diversity and Committee on Academic Personnel, the Committee on Teaching has been charged with developing a more unified campus practice for evaluating teaching, and advising the administration on the implementation of the new system.

The committee is considering substantial changes to our current course evaluations. The changes aim to shift the culture and use of course evaluations away from being the de-facto primary method by which teaching is evaluated, and towards using them as a tool to assist instructors in improving their courses and reach the goals they have for their students. The shift additionally aims to address persistent questions about bias in the current SETs. Obviously, this ambitious agenda raises many questions and we need your help to accomplish this task.

The goal of this town hall is to inform and solicit feedback from faculty, instructors, and students about the potential changes to course evaluation, which could have important widespread impact on all faculty, as well as students, shifting how teaching is assessed on our campus. We urge you to attend the Committee on Teaching’s town hall, the agenda is tentatively planned as follows:

Part 1: What’s Being Considered, and Why (2:30 pm)

1. Introduction and Overview: What’s Changing, and Why (Matthew McCarthy, COT chair)
2. Bias Issuesin student evaluation of teaching (Miriam Greenberg, CAAD chair)
3. Evaluations Now: how departments are currently using them: “Quick Facts” – Current Department Practices from COTs survey – (Kimberly Helmer, COT Member)
4. Center for Innovations in Teaching & Learning: New Support for Course and Professional Development (Jody Greene, Director)
5. Short overview: Options for Change (COT; see key questions below)
6. Question and Answer Period

Part 2: Breakout Session: An ambulatory, Interactive Discussion and Feedback (3:50 pm) – Questions to Think About Before the Town Hall

1. ​​A Proposed Culture Shift​: ​Is it a good idea to try to change the main function of online evaluations away from “rate my professor” (“summative” goal), toward mainly an asset in helping professors reach their own teaching goals, improve their courses, etc. (“formative”)?
2. Other Measures: If this shift took place, what other measures would be most useful to evaluate teaching for personnel actions? What’s really possible, and what might be unintended consequences? See UC Academic Personnel Manual; pg 4-5 for UC policy.
3. Rates of Return​: ​What are the best ways to increase evaluation return rates? What are lousy ways? Options range from formal course participation credit, extra credit, early or delayed access, to bringing back in-class evaluation time.
4. Time windows​: ​Currently, course evaluations are open to students from the 9th week until the 1st day of finals week. Should this be changed? Should it be customizable, by course and/or department?

Part 3: Open Discussion with Refreshments (4:30 pm)

Please join us for an Academic Senate forum addressing issues related to student success. The forum is scheduled for Friday, February 10th, 2:30 pm-4:30 pm, in the Stevenson Event Center and will take the place of the Academic Senate Meeting originally scheduled for this date.

The purpose of this forum is to inform and consult with the faculty about new campus initiatives, including various methods of data collection, possible applications for such analytics, and recent HSI grants that seek to improve all student success. The forum will consist of three short presentations with Q&A throughout.

Faculty input is critical at this stage, particularly given the diversity of perspectives and philosophies concerning the use of metrics in addressing issues of student success. We hope that faculty and departmental staff working with the undergraduate curricula will ask questions, offer feedback, and contribute to the development of possible interventions based on any metrics we generate through the different systems currently being developed and/or implemented. 

Panelists and short summaries of their topics:

1. VPSS Jaye Padgett – Student Success Collaborative Campus (SSC Campus)
VPSS Padgett will describe an enterprise system for student success, called SSC Campus (soon to be called “Slug Success”) that the Division of Student Success is implementing. The system is designed to support coordination of advising, case management, appointment making, alerts about students at risk in key courses or at risk of not qualifying for the major, and predictive analytics, which is the use of historical student information system data to gauge the risk of current students not graduating in their major. The SSC Campus team is seeking feedback on the use of some of this functionality, especially about the use and implications of predictive analytics for student success.

2. CEP Chair John Tamkun – Use of Data Analysis and Visualization to Promote Student Success

Chair Tamkun will present the results of a longitudinal study of undergraduates interested in the life sciences and engineering who entered UCSC as freshmen in the fall of 2012. He will describe the academic challenges faced by these students, including factors affecting their retention and timely graduation, with a focus on traditionally underrepresented groups in STEM fields. The lessons learned from this study will be discussed in the context of the emerging field of predictive analytics.

3. Professor Juan Poblete and AVP Pablo Reguerin – HSI Grants and Programming
Professor Poblete and AVP Reguerin will share findings based on the work that the UCSC Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) team (composed of staff, administrators and faculty)has conducted over the past several years. Having identified preparatory Math and Writing education, sense of belonging, and advising as four key areas, the HSI team set out to gather the data to quantify and understand the true nature and dimensions of our issues in each area. Professor Poblete and AVP Reguerin will present the HSI team’s equity based conceptual and data gathering approach, now being implemented at UCSC with the help of three U.S. Department of Education Title V HSI grant awards totaling 9.3 million dollars over the next five years.

View the video

Forum on Innovations in Teaching with Technology

Effective use of students’ engagement in transforming the learning experience of a large introductory Mathematics class

Nandini Bhattacharya, Mathematics, demonstrated her approach to active learning in introductory large lecture Mathematics courses by increasing students’ participation with the use of short pre-lecture videos, clickers during lecture and collaborative discussions during sections. She covered the nuts and bolts of transforming a large lecture course, such as PreCalculus, to a hybrid model.

Online quizzes & collaborative translation in elementary and upper-division language classes

Jenny Lynn, Classical Studies, demonstrated her use of online quizzes to guide student reading, test student comprehension, and give students practice identifying noun and verb forms. These quizzes can be randomly generated from large question pools so that students may take them repeatedly. She also demonstrated the use of a site where all students in the class can contribute to a collaborative translation of a Greek or Latin text.

Instructional Design Support & Faculty Instructional Technology Center Resources

Aaron Zachmeier, Academic Affairs Instructional Designer, and Leslie Kern, FITC Operations Manager, provided an overview of the available services and technologies to support faculty in developing online and hybrid instruction, from individual modules to entire courses.

Recording unavailable

Amidst all the hype of online education, the Committee on Teaching threw an event, “So you think your lecture course is better than a MOOC?” which aimed to highlight contemporary teaching methods.

Faculty, lecturers, and students came and stretched their pedagogical muscles by listening to a variety of

“lightning talks” from UCSC professors on their successful instructional techniques.  There was lots of opportunity for Q&A with the presenters and audience.  Talks included:

• Charlie McDowell – “Having your cake and eating it too-why is it either or?”
• Kirsten Silva-Gruesz – “Leading with Reading”
• Kevin Karplus – “Designing Courses to Teach Design”
• Bruce Bridgeman – “Psychology vs. Experience: Do you see what’s on your retina?”
• Dan Selden – “Teaching and Transference”
• Michael Chemers – “Presence and Transformation: What’s Missing from a MOOC”

Recording unavailable

The Committee on Teaching, in collaboration with the Committee on Educational Policy, will host the third in a series of forums on online education. The spring forum, “Online Education & UCSC: What’s next?” will focus on the big questions surrounding online education: How will online education change the role of the professor? What are the risks to faculty in respect to intellectual property in offering online courses? How will online courses be assessed, and who will determine the measures for success? Panelist will discuss these and many more questions. We hope you can join us for this spirited discussion.

The event was held on Friday, April 26, 2013 at 3:15-5:00 p.m. in the Stevenson College Event Center.

Panelists include the following:

• Daphne Koller, Co-founder of Cousera, Professor of Computer Science, Stanford University
• Robert Meister, Professor of History of Consciousness, UCSC
• Rodney Ogawa, Professor of Education, UCSC
• Alison Galloway, Campus Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor

Student Representative from the UCSC Student Organization “New School”

Moderated by Lois Kazakoff, Deputy Editor for the San Francisco Chronicle, and UCSC alumna (Cowell 1976)

The Committee on Educational Policy, in collaboration with the Committee on Teaching, is hosting the second in a series of forums on online education. This quarter’s forum “UCSC Educational Technology Trade Show” will give faculty and staff an opportunity to view pedagogical technologies in action. Experts in a variety of disciplines will demonstrate educational technologies such as tablet augmented teaching, interaction with remote students via Adobe Connect, resources for educational filming, ways that UNEX can help with the design and implementation of online courses, and more. We want this forum to involve a lot of individual interaction. Feel free to come even if you have to show up late or leave early.

The event will be held on Wednesday, January 30, 2013 at 3:00 p.m. in the Stevenson College Event Center. This event is being held in lieu of the previously scheduled Academic Senate meeting. The next Senate meeting will be held on Friday, March 8, 2013 at 2:30 p.m.

Audio recording of the forum

Presenters’ slides from the forum

“Moving Online: Stakes and Assumptions” is the first in a series of forums hosted by COT and CEP on online education. The forums will address issues of assessment, quality, access, and the costs of online education. The first forum includes a panelist of UCSC faculty discussing the questions posed below.

Charlie McDowell, Chair of COT, Introductory Remarks
(starts at 00:00)

Diane Gifford-Gonzalez, Anthropology, With more online courses are we moving implicitly to a different model of education?
(starts at 6:49*) 

Brent Haddad, Environmental Studies, What questions should we be asking?
(starts at 15:56*)

Ira Pohl, Computer Science, Should we allow our students to get credit for MOOCs?
(starts at 25:10*)

Kip Tellez, Education, Should UCSC be trying to compete or cooperate with the likes of EdX and Coursera?
(starts at 37:30*)

Anthony Tromba, Mathematics, What role can online education play in science and engineering instruction?
(starts at 44:23*)

Tracy Larrabee, Chair of CEP, What is CEP’s role in approving and regulating the use of online courses?
(starts at 1:00:12*)

The Senate Executive Committee is sponsoring this forum, intended to be the first in a series of campus-wide conversations about the curriculum.

We hope to start to address the following broad questions:

• How effectively are our development, planning and implementation of the curriculum, both undergraduate and graduate, being served by campus practices, policies and structure?
• How are research and curricular needs aligned with and served by those structures?

This forum is in lieu of the previously scheduled Senate meeting.

__________________________________________

We’ve assembled a panel of faculty each of whom was asked to speak for 5-7 minutes on challenges, strategies, successes and failures in their departmental and disciplinary experience, considering how these may be used by other faculty in other departments or interdisciplines.

• Barry Bowman (MCD Biology): your department represents one of the largest majors on campus.  What strategies have you used successfully to get your students through the major?  What planning tools have helped or would help (major maps, degree audit, etc.)?
• Ben Carson (Music): your department undertook a curricular review in the last five years.  What were the goals, and how has it worked? What do you think are the elements other departments might find most useful from your experience?
• Brent Haddad (Environmental Studies): you have experience with developing a thriving and innovative department in Environmental Studies.  What strategies have you successfully used to build an interdisciplinary program with both undergraduate and graduate components?
• Jorge Hankamer (Linguistics): your department successfully grew what had been a small undergraduate program into two robust undergraduate majors that successfully coordinate with the graduate program.  What strategies did you use to create connectivity between the curricular components?  How do you use combined graduate/undergrad courses within the curriculum?
• Jim Whitehead (Computer Science): your department developed a new interdisciplinary and interdivisional major in Computer Game Design that attracted over 400 students.  What were the strategies you used in leading that development, and how are you getting the unexpectedly large number of students through the major?
• Alice Yang (History, Provost of Stevenson College): your experience in coordinating with faculty and students from a variety of different departments and divisions has been critical in the advance planning for an interdisciplinary program in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies.  What strategies have you used successfully in planning for CRES? How has your provost role also contributed to the early stages of CRES planning?  What advice can you offer to other programs wanting to reach across disciplinary and divisional boundaries?

We have invited EVC Alison Galloway and Interim Dean of Physical and Biological Sciences Paul Koch to sit with the panelists and participate in the open discussion. The goal is to have the kind of collaborative, campus-wide discussions that are not possible in either the departmental or divisional context. We are working to get a bigger and broader audience of faculty (beyond those who generally attend Senate meetings), as well as other interested parties (e.g., college and departmental advisors). Your collective participation will be critical to the success of this event and beyond.