Members Present: Joe Moffett (Chair), Ashok Kumar (Vice Chair), Ibukun Amusan (Secretary), Nancy Capriles, Maheteme Gebremedhin, Nkechi Amadife

Guest: Suzette Polson

Meeting called to order at 3:12

The Agenda was approved.

A new proposal for consideration, submitted by Dr. Polson, about Integrated Studies (IGS) courses for transfer students was discussed. The current KSU catalog does not explicitly state the number of IGS credit hours that transfer students are required to take. An old catalog for 2012-2013 was more specific about the IGS requirements but there is no knowledge of senate cutting some of the details out or faculty being informed of the deletions. The proposed correction to the current catalog will add more details similar to the ones that last appeared in the 2012-2013 catalog. Specifically, students with transfer credits less than or equal to 30 hours must complete 9 IGS credit hours at KSU, students with greater than 30 but less than 45 transfer hours must complete 6 hours of IGS at KSU, students with more than 44 but less than 60 must complete 3 hours of IGS at KSU, and transfer students with more than 60 hours will not be required to take any IGS course at KSU. Also, students that have associated degrees (AA or AS) will not be required to take any IGS course. The current policy in the 2016-2017 catalog requires a bit of running around for transfer students and their advisors to figure out the number of IGS hours required after transfer. It was mentioned that faculty may not have to deal much with issues related to the IGS courses required with the centralized advising being considered by administration. However, some divisions, e.g. Math and Sciences, may likely push back against centralized advising.

It was noted that hybrid courses may not be for students that are very far from campus because of the number of required face-to-face meetings per semester. The purpose of hybrid courses is mainly to have more options for course design. It may be particularly useful for online courses that have a lab component. It will be recommended that instructors put in their syllabi any specific requirements for attendance in the online/hybrid courses.

It was recommended that a Director of online programs be appointed. The director should have a staffed office that will support faculty, and the office’s staff can have different hours to accommodate faculty that teach late in the day. The office should have a room well equipped to help faculty with online teaching.

The returned proposal has a paragraph about assessing the readiness of first-semester students to take online classes. The assessment has to be completed before the semester starts, and the VPAA will have to give approval for any student not meeting the required standard to continue in the online class.

The previous proposal stated that the evaluation of virtual courses will be a mandatory part of pre-tenure review. This will be removed from the new proposal so that it will not be mandatory. Also, the evaluation of online courses by an outside body may be expensive. For example, one that was recently done cost $1000 per course.