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THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE
UNIVERSITY
T H E S E N A T E R E C O R D
Volume 34-----FEBRUARY 27,
2001-----Number 5
The
Senate Record
is the official publication of the University Faculty Senate of The
Pennsylvania State University, as provided for in Article I, Section 9 of the Standing
Rules of the Senate and contained in the Constitution, Bylaws, and Standing Rules of the University Faculty
Senate, The Pennsylvania State University 2000-01.
The
publication is issued by the Senate Office, 101 Kern Graduate Building,
University Park, PA 16802 (Telephone
814-863-0221). The Record is
distributed to all Libraries across the Penn State system, and is posted on the
Web at http://www.psu.edu/ufs under publications. Copies are made available to faculty and
other University personnel on request.
Except
for items specified in the applicable Standing Rules, decisions on the
responsibility for inclusion of matters in the publication are those of the
Chair of the University Faculty Senate.
When
existing communication channels seem inappropriate, Senators are encouraged to
submit brief letters relevant to the Senate's function as a legislative,
advisory and forensic body to the Chair for possible inclusion in The Senate
Record.
Reports
which have appeared in the Agenda of the meeting are not included in The
Record unless they have been changed substantially during the meeting or
are considered to be of major importance.
Remarks and discussion are abbreviated in most instances. A complete transcript and tape of the
meeting is on file.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. Final Agenda for
February 27, 2001
A. Summary of Agenda
Actions
B. Minutes and
Summaries of Remarks
II. Enumeration of Documents
A.
Documents
Distributed Prior to February 27, 2001
B.
Attached
Corrected Copy – Curricular Affairs Committee –
A Clarification of “Active Learning”
as it Applies
To General Education
Attendance
III. Tentative Agenda for March
27, 2001
FINAL AGENDA FOR FEBRUARY 27, 2001
A. MINUTES OF THE PRECEDING MEETING -
Minutes of the January 30, 2001, Meeting in The Senate Record 34:4
B. COMMUNICATIONS TO THE SENATE - Senate Curriculum Report
(Blue Sheets) of February 13, 2001
C. REPORT OF SENATE COUNCIL - Meeting of February 13, 2001
D. ANNOUNCEMENTS BY THE CHAIR -
E. COMMENTS BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNIVERSITY -
F. FORENSIC BUSINESS -
Research
Courseware Policy
G. UNFINISHED BUSINESS -
Committees and Rules
Revision of Bylaws, Article III, Section 4
H. LEGISLATIVE REPORTS -
Curricular Affairs
A Clarification of “Active Learning” as it Applies to General Education
I. ADVISORY/CONSULTATIVE REPORTS –
Outreach Activities
Recommendation to Refine and Expand the Models for Recognition
of Outreach Activities
J. INFORMATIONAL REPORTS –
Computing and Information Systems
Student Computing Initiative
Information Technology Fee Overview for FY 2000/2001
Faculty Rights and Responsibilities
Annual Report for 1999-2000
Outreach Activities
Penn State Alumni Association
Undergraduate Education
Grade Distribution Report
K. NEW LEGISLATIVE BUSINESS -
L. COMMENTS AND RECOMMENDATIONS FOR THE GOOD OF THE
UNIVERSITY -
M. ADJOURNMENT -
SUMMARY OF AGENDA ACTIONS
The Senate passed
two Legislative Reports:
Committees and Rules - "Revision of Bylaws, Article III, Section (4).” This report requires that the results of Voting Unit elections be reported to the Senate Office by the first Friday in February. (See Record, page(s) 21-22 and Agenda Appendix "C.")
Curricular Affairs – “A Clarification of “Active Learning” as it Applies to General Education.” This report increases the active learning elements from the original 5 to 7 in number. (See Record, page(s) 22-27, Agenda Appendix "D," and Corrected Copy Record Appendix II.)
The Senate passed one Advisory/Consultative Report:
Outreach Activities – “Recommendation to Refine and Expand the Models for Recognition of Outreach Activities.” This report recommends that Penn State strengthen and expand assessment models of scholarship to recognize better the value of outreach activities. (See Record, page(s) 27-29 and Agenda Appendix "E.")
The Senate heard five Informational Reports:
Computing and Information Systems – “Student Computing Initiative.” This document reports that the initiated communication, both print and electronic, effectively achieved the goals of the student computing initiative to students and parents. (See Record, page(s) 30 and Agenda Appendix "F.")
Computing and Information Systems – “Information Technology Fee Overview for FY 2000/2001.” The report describes the status of the use of the Information Technology Fee and the areas where these monies are being used. (See Record, page(s) 30-31 and Agenda Appendix "G.")
Faculty Rights and Responsibilities – “Annual Report for 1999-2000.” This is the report by the Chair of FR&R describing the caseload (numbers and types of cases) of the committee addressed last academic year. (See Record, page(s) 31-32 and Agenda Appendix "H.")
Outreach Activities – “Penn State Alumni Association.” This report describes the history, missions, organizational structure, programs and services of the PSAA. (See Record, page(s) 32-34 and Agenda Appendix "I.")
Undergraduate Education – “Grade Distribution Report.” This report describes the comparison of the distribution of grade at the institution for the spring term of 1975 to spring semester of 2000. (See Record, page(s) 34-35 and Agenda Appendix "J.")
The Senate participated in one Forensic Session:
Research – “Courseware Policy.” This session was held to survey the sense of the Senate on issues surrounding a newly proposed courseware policy. (See Record, page(s) 3-21 and Agenda Appendix "B.")
The University Faculty Senate met on Tuesday, February 27, 2001, at 1:30 p.m. in Room 112 Kern Graduate Building with Cara-Lynne Schengrund, Chair, presiding. One hundred and fifty-five Senators signed the roster.
Chair Schengrund: It is time to begin.
MINUTES OF THE PRECEDING MEETING
Moving to the minutes of the preceding meeting, The Senate Record, providing a full transcription of the proceedings of the January 30, 2001 meeting, was sent to all University Libraries, and posted on the University Faculty Senate's web page. Are there any corrections or additions to this document? All those in favor of accepting the minutes, please signify by saying, "aye."
Senators: Aye.
Chair Schengrund: Opposed? The minutes are accepted. Thank you.
COMMUNICATIONS TO THE SENATE
You have received the Senate Curriculum Report for February 13, 2001. This document is posted on the University Faculty Senate's web page.
REPORT OF SENATE COUNCIL
Also, you should have received the Report of Senate Council for the meeting of
February 13, 2001. This is an attachment in The Senate Agenda for today's meeting.
ANNOUNCEMENTS BY THE CHAIR
Chair Schengrund: The Faculty Advisory Committee met on
Tuesday, February 13, 2001, and we discussed the following topics: Governor’s proposed budget; we went over a
review of legislative and free speech implications of the Sex Faire; we
discussed student matters; we had an update on the meetings held by the
committee that was formed by the Black student coalition; we went over Justin
Leto’s comments to the Senate; we went over the printing of the Blue Book, (and
I might add that in regards to the Blue Book it will be printed once
again. How many more times after this I
can’t guarantee, but it will be printed again); we went over the
administration’s position on UniSCOPE; and implications of the Pope/ARL case on
safety of Penn State researchers abroad.
The next meeting of FAC is
scheduled for Tuesday, March 13, 2001.
If anyone wishes to place an item on the FAC agenda please contact one
of the Senate Officers, or one of the three elected FAC members; Peter Deines,
Peter Rebane or Gordon De Jong.
The Senate Officers visited the College of Arts and Architecture on February 12, 2001 and the Division of Undergraduate Studies on February 26, 2001. Tomorrow (February 28, 2001) we will visit the College of Agricultural Sciences, and with that visit we will conclude our visits to units at University Park for the spring semester.
The Senate Office has received a memo from President Spanier, and that dealt with implementing the report that we passed at our December 5, 2000 meeting. This report was from the Undergraduate Education Committee titled “Revision of Senate Policy 42-27: Class Attendance”. President Spanier approved this legislation to be effective spring 2001, and referred the report to the Vice Provost and Dean for Undergraduate Education, for implementation. Please refer to the Senate Council minutes of February 13, 2001, attached to your Agenda, for additional announcements made.
Provost Erickson and I have met, and we’ve appointed a Joint Committee to Review the University Calendar in its entirety, and this arose from a number of comments that were made when we visited the various campuses in the spring, and by various faculty at University Park--dealing with the numbers of breaks in the fall semester; the lack of a final exam period in the summer, etc. James Smith has agreed to chair this committee. Other members of the calendar committee include: Anthony Baratta; George Bugyi; John Cahir; a student that is to be appointed; Donald Leslie; Jane Sutton; and James Wager. If you have any specific comments regarding the calendar that you would like them to consider, please feel free to contact any one of the members of that committee. The Senate and the provost will look forward to receiving a report from this committee early in the fall 2001.
Finally, the Senate Officers have been meeting with the coalition of students and discussing their demands with them. At this point their demands are for the following: The first of which is that there be a diversity component included during orientation, this might be done as a reading, followed by perhaps discussion, followed by perhaps a workshop in the residences that would be organized and run by the residence hall advisors; they have dropped their demand for the mandated three-credit course on racism, but they are asking the African, African-American Studies Department to develop a three-credit course on racism that would be offered as a general education course, that would meet international/intercultural components and could be taken by students; the development of a research institute (which is something that Dean Welch and the Department of African, African-American Studies are looking into). That concludes my comments.
COMMENTS BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNIVERSITY
Chair
Schengrund: Most of you are aware that President Spanier is in Harrisburg
today. He is representing Penn State at
the congressional hearings on our budget, and probably answering a number of
questions about the Sex Faire for Representative Lawless. However, he has indicated that if he gets
back prior to the end of this meeting, he will be happy to make his comments at
that time.
I also feel I should
before I continue, respond to the handout that was given outside the door,
since it indicates that the Senate turned down the request of the graduate
students to talk to the Senate. I
received an email from one graduate student requesting the privilege of the
floor under “Comments and Recommendations For The Good Of The University” to
discuss graduate student unionization.
I denied that request because actually the voting on whether or not to
unionize is something that the graduate students do. We do not have any say in what happens with regards to their
desire to unionize.
Moving on, as we
begin our discussion of reports, I will remind you to please stand and identify
yourself, and the unit you represent before addressing the Senate. Our first item of business today is
forensic. It deals with the Courseware
Policy which is in Appendix “B” and is being brought forth by the Senate Committee
on Research. Thomas Jackson and Guy
Barbato will lead the discussion, and before we actually start I would like to
set the sort of ground rules for the discussion. And that is that we are going to start with an allocation of 30
minutes. If there are still substantive
and new issues being raised at the end of 30 minutes, we’ll continue the
forensic discussion. If you have run
out of new substantive comments to make at the end of 30 minutes, we will stop
the forensic discussion. If you have
specific changes that you would like to see, I will ask you to give them to
either Guy or Tom prior to leaving the Senate meeting. This is an issue that was under study in a
way for two years by the Intellectual Property Committee. The courseware policy portion of it was then
given to the Joint Subcommittee. They
worked on it in the summer and early fall.
It came to the Senate for review in December. The committee has been asked to take all of the comments made
that are new and substantive during the discussion, review them, work together
to try to come with a consensus and re-write the document so that it will
hopefully come back to you as an advisory/consultative report in March. If we do not work on this, this year, it
will die over the summer I’m sure, and come back in the fall, and it may well
be another year before this would come forth to the Senate for a vote. I would like to see what kind of a consensus
we can reach and then it will come forth again, and it will either be voted in
or out at that time. If it doesn’t make
it for March, hopefully it will make it for April. So, Guy I will turn this over to you and Tom, and we do have some
individuals who have requested the privilege of the floor during this
discussion who are not members of the Senate, but are members of the
university.
FORENSIC BUSINESS
SENATE COMMITTEE
ON RESEARCH
Courseware Policy
Guy F. Barbato, Chair Senate Committee on Research
Guy F. Barbato, College of Agricultural Sciences: Thank you very much to the chair and to the officers and to the rest of the Faculty Senate. Just to give you a little bit of history, just to back up how long this has been on the table. There was a note from the April 2000 meeting last year of the Faculty Senate that the purpose of the discussion was to update copyright policy at the university that dates from 1982, and I suspect we don’t want to make this a 20-year annual report. However, I do want to point out that the final report of the blue ribbon panel charged to study computer aided instruction and learning, known as the Dutton Report, occurred in 1996. Thereafter, the Senate Committee on Faculty Affairs and the Senate Committee on Research were charged to comment on the Dutton Report. The Joint Committee of Faculty Affairs and Research produced an advisory/consultative report which was passed in the Senate in February of 1998. As part of that there was also the report on Intellectual Property brought back to the Senate again, this seems to be a two year cycle, on April 25, 2000 (so this is last spring). I think that the big concerns that were raised really, and I’ll quote a few faculty who spoke at the meeting from the Senate Record, one was Alison Carr-Chellman who pointed out that, “we need to cautiously consider any polices which bring us closer in alignment with corporate mentalities and profit driven numbers. Including giving the university broad powers to control faculty members pursuits of the open exchange of ideas”. I have to point out that these issues are incredibly complex, and part of the committee’s charge dating back to that April 2000 meeting was to come up with some meeting of the minds, and to reconcile two very different views on intellectual property, and specifically as it relates to courseware at Penn State. I think that Ronald Bettig from the College of Communications probably said it best and more cleverly than I could ever possibly which is in reflecting on the report, “I have to point out personally as well as a committee of one, I do not always find myself in agreement. This is because as the report will demonstrate, there are several contradictions between the mission of the university, and private ownership of intellectual property”. Be that as it may, we do have a mission for the university, and we do have ownership of intellectual property, and so we need to reconcile those views. This report is an attempt to provide a broad structure, rather than tackle every individual instance that may occur. It will, much like my tomato garden in the backyard, require regular tending, review and possibly even modification. And the mechanism for this will be an advisory committee which would be appointed jointly by the Vice President of Research in consultation with the Chair of the Senate. With that as a bit of a preface, let me turn it over to Tom who chaired the subcommittee which came up with the policy draft.
Thomas N. Jackson, College of Engineering: I’ll take just a moment to try to set the stage for the discussion. We claim in the report, and I think there is more than a small amount of truth there, that the purpose of the report, the purpose of the policy, is to provide strong incentives for Penn State personnel--a number of faculty have gotten back to me saying they don’t see that. Because you have to consider the second half of the statement as well, while also protecting ‘Penn State the institution interest,’ and also controlling costs to students. The approach to doing that has been to try to clearly define what do we mean by courseware, and how do we use it. We broke it into two main categories that you see--complete courseware by which we mean computer based products that replace courses and everything else. The everything else we called courseware modules and they include things like electronic textbooks, web pages that support a course, those things, when clearly we’d like to have a solid demarcation between those. You have a little flow chart that shows how the policy is intended to be used, and you may want to refer to that as we discuss how this all is intended to work. Let me just go through the philosophy behind that very quickly. The philosophy was that the courseware and courseware modular development need to be consistent with the primary obligations that Penn State faculty have to teaching, research and service. And that because courseware more than most other activities that faculty have brings with it the potential for conflict of interest and conflict of commitment we have to look carefully at how courseware will be done and how it will be used. And in particular and probably the largest stumbling block that most faculty see is that Penn State needs to have a role in regulating, or approving, or overseeing, or however we want to call it looking at courseware that substantially competes with Penn State educational programs. We don’t say that about much else that faculty do, because there isn’t a lot else where faculty can directly compete with the institution. Going through those categories very quickly then, commissioned courseware has a written agreement. Penn State owns the copyright, it’s simple. If it gets used outside Penn State, authors should share in the benefits and the breakdown there is what’s currently used by the World Campus--50 percent goes to the author. For noncommissioned courseware, what we’re looking for is disclosure so that the institution knows that it’s happening. The author owns the copyright. If it’s used at Penn State, it’s used royalty free and Penn State has a legal responsibility for internal use, the author has responsibility for any other use, subject to that substantial competition. Commissioned courseware modules are similar to commissioned courseware written agreement--Penn State owns the copyright--again it’s simple. If it’s used externally the author should benefit with again 50 percent of the royalties. Noncommissioned courseware modules again require disclosure--author owns the copyright, Penn State internal use royalty free, and Penn State bears the legal responsibility for its use and the author for all other uses again subject to the competition. Then the other area that we looked at besides who owned what and who gets what, is under what circumstances should it be used, and the policy that’s before you says that if it’s courseware that’s something that replaces a complete course certainly we want to have Penn State’s supervision for that. If it’s minimal cost courseware, that should be done at the department level. In other words, keep the administrative procedures as far away from it as we can. On the other hand, if it’s something where there’s significant revenue streams attached to it, then that needs to be a published work--either by Penn State or by somebody else. The idea is somebody has to own responsibility for it. Courseware modules are where more of us are going to live our lives. Not very many of us are going to do complete course replacements and so we’d like to make sure that we protect faculty freedoms to use courseware modules, where they are appropriate to enhance teaching--those are offered at no cost. Then we have put in the policy what would be supervised and owned and cared for by the author themselves. If there are things that need to have some cost associated with it but that cost is minimal, the supervision would be provided at the departmental level. And finally for things where again there’s a significant revenue stream, we would only allow published works. Finally, how is all this going to work and I think it’s important to note as Guy did, that this needs to be an evolving process. Had we generated a courseware policy three years ago or so when this all began, it would not be recognizably connected to what we have today. Things are changing very rapidly and they’ll continue to, and the mode to try to adapt to that change is to have the courseware advisory committee that would be appointed by the Vice President for Research in consultation with the Faculty Senate Chair. Their first step will be to develop implementation guidelines and I want to stress that. That you don’t have guidelines before you for implementation. We can easily any of us, think of arcane or low probability scenarios for this or for that. I’d like to try if we can to avoid discussing some of those low probability particulars. I don’t think they are going to help us very much to understand what the broad outlines of the policy should be, that’s really something we’ve left to the implementation task. Finally, that committee would have responsibility to review and modify the policy, so that it can evolve to suit the needs of both the institution and the faculty. And with that, I welcome comments and complaints and whatnot.
Howard G. Sachs, Penn State Harrisburg: This pertains to recommendation one and recommendation three. This is the matter of sabbatical leaves. Where in the application for sabbatical leave does it appear that a professor is going to develop either software modules or a software course? I think this has to be explicitly dealt with early on in the process because this is real use of university resource, and it’s also a real commitment on the part of the faculty. One could right a treatise on both sides of this issue, but I would simply implore that the committee take a serious look at this.
Tramble T. Turner, Penn State Abington: How might your committee’s report be revised to include an option that would allow faculty members to designate courseware or commissioned courseware modules as shareware? You emphasize streams of revenue but what if someone wants to ensure then what they develop that…
Thomas N. Jackson: An important part of what the committee was trying to do and certainly from my perspective was to protect areas of faculty rights. And so we made a fairly careful demarcation there that courseware or courseware modules are provided at low cost or no cost, particularly in the case of courseware modules, where it might be electronic textbook or essentially a lab pack or course pack notes or something like that. If those are provided at no cost then the Penn State author should provide all of the necessary supervision. So you would own it, you do what you need with it, you maintain it, you keep it going. Now there are some risks to the institution there…when we began this it was not trivial to carve that out, because the university of course, is concerned about what liability they might have from those actions. And so the same sort of care with copyright that is encouraged for course packs would also need to be done even for these courseware modules that would be at no cost. But the intent of the policy was that things that were offered at no cost, particularly courseware modules, would be owned and maintained by faculty.
Stephen M. Smith, College of Agricultural Sciences: In general I think this is okay, it’s improved, but if you haven’t read it I would urge you to do it carefully and have your colleagues do so if you’re thinking about getting involved in this type of work. Several faculty in my department have been quite involved in the past year, we had a lot of concerns at the beginning, several of them have been resolved but they still have considerable concerns, and I’d just like to summarize some of their comments to me after their having read this. One faculty member said, “it really seems to change the role of faculty from what we thought we were, to more contract employees,” if we read through some of those issues. Another one specifically said he really thinks it does not provide incentive, quite the opposite. That it seems to be designed to discourage us to get into this, and another commented that it really seems to help go a long way towards limiting our academic and intellectual freedom. I’d just like to point out one example on page seven, recommendation 5a, and maybe I’m confused and not reading it well either but it looks to me on that one…I don’t see why this is any different than any course I may develop, and why it requires so much supervision, or if you look at point two under “a,” why is that any different than if I use a textbook in a class or if I write a textbook and use it, but I don’t understand…maybe I’ve missed it. Doesn’t seem to require the amount of supervision that is indicated in this. Thank you.
Thomas N. Jackson: Let me respond to the third one first. The intent is that it actually be quite similar to how a course is. A faculty member cannot run courses on their own authority. The university runs courses. We very often attach courses to a faculty name and to their personality in some cases but nonetheless it’s a Penn State course and the same thing is true here. And so if you’re going to use courseware to run a course the university is who actually does that and so you go to your department and say I want to run this course and we’re going to use courseware to do it and here’s how it’s going to be and it gets listed like anything else. The point is that it’s not happening somehow off at the side. We don’t want to put faculty in the position of providing credit in degrees and programs themselves, and so it’s intended to be similar there. Some of the elaborations of that however, why should this have to be published for example, and the idea there is that these are very substantive works, these are not a small addition or enhancement to a course, these are course replacements. So who takes the responsibility to say that this is being done in a way which dot’s the “i’s”, and crosses the “t’s” of things like required copyright, etc. And so the idea is that just as we normally turn to published works for textbooks even more so you would do that for courseware, which is replacing a course not simply supplementing it. So the intent is that it actually follow similar to the earlier model. The other ones I’ll speak to very briefly. I think the comments are very valuable. Does this discourage or not? I think the model where it doesn’t discourage is where Penn State becomes the publisher of choice and the faculty would want to turn to that publisher. But the reality is that because faculty are able to be in a competitive position that’s not always going to work and it is going to step on faculty toes in some cases and this is something the committee struggled a very great deal with and ended up with a divided opinion and a consensus that the policy that we put before you was about the best that we could sort out. It doesn’t do everything that we can do to encourage courseware development. It does go farther than the initial cuts, in that it did, and it does a better job of protecting faculty rights. The idea that there’s nothing else at Penn State that has that kind of contract…if you look at for example the language in HR-80 the private consulting practice, it has a statement that says a faculty member is expected to perform his or her university duties in the most effective manner which he or she is capable. The faculty member’s first duty and first responsibility is to the university. I suspect you can put family, country and God ahead of that, but maybe not. Outside service should not be undertaken whether with or without pay that might interfere with the discharge of this paramount obligation. I guess what I’m trying to convince you is, this isn’t really different in kind, the difference is that it’s in an area where faculty are more acutely aware that this is a place they may have their toes stepped on and it’s quite correct that it does.
Alison Carr-Chellman, College of Education: I have a prepared statement if I may and I’ll try to make it brief. I represent a couple of different groups here today the Department of Adult Education/Instructional Systems/Workforce Education & Development which believe it or not is a department. After a lengthy discussion at our departmental faculty meeting, our faculty does not support this current policy and voted unanimously that the following three points be addressed in any revision of this policy:
1. Removal of the conflict of commitment clause
2. Clarification of who has access to courses and course modules, who owns them in certain circumstances, how they can be used, where does (and will in the future) the academic home/control over these courses reside and
3. Reconciliation of this policy with the policies and contracts of World Campus and Intellectual Property.
This department has been very involved with World Campus. Adult Education has an entire master’s degree online, Instructional Systems has a number of courses. So we’re very interested in this policy, and I think we’re fairly well informed about what some of these things may mean, so that’s the department. The College of Education Caucus--I’m the Senate counselor for the Education Caucus--the Education Caucus met yesterday, and reviewed our views of the courseware policy, and the caucus is uncomfortable with certain issues. We have alternative policy statements which the caucus is happy to make available to the authors, to the extent that would be helpful. We respect and appreciate the work the authors have done, but the following concerns emerged. The policy does not encourage entrepreneurial activity on the part of faculty in the view of the caucus. There is a difficulty in really nailing down exactly what is digital and what is not, and therefore it is difficult to know precisely what is covered by this policy. We are concerned that courseware may be a term which will extend to include digital texts and certain types of textbooks. We are concerned finally, that the university may lose good faculty because of this policy. And now I have a statement for myself. I believe that the following is a non-compete clause taken directly from the proposed policy, “The sale or use of courseware or courseware modules in areas that substantially compete with Penn State educational programs is not allowed without prior university approval”. Although the authors term it a "conflict of commitment," they come to the same thing in my view. Daily I choose to stay at Penn State, daily we all choose to be academics, we choose to be teachers, researchers, and offer service to the commonwealth. We choose this noble occupation because we believe in what we do, and we fundamentally believe in Penn State. Despite compressed salaries, competitive offers, and industry wages that far outpace those of the academy, we are indeed devoted. If anyone is Penn State, we are. There are reasons why a non-compete clause dampens my otherwise rah rah spirit toward my job and my institution. First, a non-compete clause is appropriate for corporations, but not for institutions of higher learning. I joined the university because I care about knowledge, I care about the open and free access of learners to that knowledge and I do not care to work for a corporation with corporate goals. We had a very eloquent presentation by a young man, Justin Leto, last month warning us not to allow a public vestige of higher learning to become a corporation referring to students as customers, and faculty as employees. Institutions of higher learning are perhaps the last respected bastion of insulation from market forces and this policy brings us a little closer, I believe to being a corporation. Second, a non-compete clause is typically coupled with significantly higher salaries than market forces for which the employee is willing to agree to the non-compete condition. If the university chooses to pursue an entrepreneurial agenda, and if they encourage faculty to behave in entrepreneurial ways, why are they surprised when faculty seek to operate in broader markets? The university wants to operate in terms of free market forces, no matter how disappointed I may be about this decision, I can't prevent them from moving in that direction, but if indeed they will move to take advantage of the free market, they cannot avoid the disadvantages of that same market on the backs of the faculty. I am sympathetic to the problem of faculty salaries and legislative allocations for Penn State's budget, particularly today. And I am sympathetic to the fact that Penn State does not want to pay for something twice. This is legitimate, however, when a faculty member creates a course on their own for a company or another university, a course that they have never taught here, and will never teach here, this is their own work, they should be allowed to pursue this work to their own benefit. The digital distinction between courseware and textbooks is, in my opinion, a temporary and arbitrary demarcation. There are gray areas, for instance, we know how textbooks are handled, but what of a textbook with a CD ROM? What of a textbook with web support? In order to clarify these gray areas, the university will necessarily have to expand this policy beyond merely electronic delivery systems. I fear this policy may cause faculty to leave for other institutions where they are freer to supplement their incomes with online consulting opportunities. At the very least, I believe this policy will serve as a strong disincentive for faculty who wish to work with the university on
e-learning projects like those faculty in my department. Ultimately, I want to see a policy that encourages faculty participation without monopolizing faculty participation. If the university has no competition because we are not allowed to work with other online institutions, then I fear the university has no reason to offer fair market compensation. This, I fear, will cause faculty to simply work on something else which is more likely to augment their incomes such as textbooks, or worse, to leave the institution for a place with more favorable policies. This non-compete clause is the most disturbing part of the proposed policy, but it is particularly upsetting when it is coupled with the terms and conditions of the policy. If you build it totally on your own, and you own it, that’s that lower left-hand corner item there, then why is the university reserving unrestricted, royalty free distribution rights and telling you that you cannot sell it to an outside vendor. If that's the case, then I wonder what the benefit of actually owning the work is? And if there's no benefit, then I'm sorry to say that faculty will not engage in this activity and thus, the policy hurts Penn State far more than it protects it. According to this policy, the Vice President for Research will approve or deny all such requests; under what guidelines will those decisions be made? These should be clearly spelled out. Before I vote for this policy I want to see the specifics, because the specifics will allow me to evaluate whether or not this policy is good for Penn State and good for faculty. This is an extremely comprehensive university, and since the university will define what competition is, this leaves the faculty in a vulnerable position. I am not interested in merely tearing down the policy. I have some ideas for how to improve it. For instance, we could offer small bits of courseware free to everyone in the commonwealth. Increase our public support by offering a public good to everyone, and offer it to the legislature as a line item as service to the commonwealth. Use that money to directly pay faculty to develop these modules, and allow Penn State to use them in their courses free, with appropriate faculty oversight. This would surely encourage me to become involved, because it's part of my daily choice to public service. Another, perhaps less idealistic option, would be to offer Penn State the right of first refusal--if faculty develop courseware, they offer it first to Penn State, but if they can arrange a better deal elsewhere, they're welcome to take it. I can live with either option, as long as we all play by the same rules…either we're all entrepreneurial, or we're all public servants. Please stand up and make your voice known whatever your opinion is. Read the policy carefully, ask your fellow faculty members what they think of it, discuss it at department meetings, make certain that you are happy with this policy, that you do not feel that it will in any way limit your abilities to pursue your work in an open non-corporate environment. If you say, this policy has been in development for more than two years--let's get it over with, it's good enough. I would respond that it is simply not good enough. If you feel that this policy doesn't affect you, it may affect you in the future so take the time to be certain that you can live with it, and finally if you are certain that the policy won't affect you, please listen to the voices of your faculty colleagues, who are affected by this policy and trust them. Personally, I'll choose the public good anytime over corporate goals, and so when Penn State stops being a public institution, when it stops focusing on the public good, it's awfully tough for me to continue to choose, daily, to devote myself to my work.
Senators: Applause.
Thomas N. Jackson: There’s no simple response I can give. I’ll make a couple of comments. We term this a conflict of commitment, not a non-compete. We have lawyer-types here so we could ask them but non-competes typically deal with after severance from an organization. Conflict of commitment is what you do while you are involved with the company or institution. So I think it properly is a conflict of commitment but the issue is really the same. If the test is going to be a policy that does not step on faculty toes at all, forget it, it’s not going to happen--in my judgment. And the reason for that is simply that this is an area where Penn State faculty needs and desires and interests conflict in a fundamental way--not true for most of what we do--with the perceived needs and interest of the institution. A couple of quick comments on that, why should…there are a number of why should’s and I’ll just give you a couple of the why should’s from the other side, not necessarily supporting them, I actually haven’t revealed my individual opinion I can perhaps do that later. The president would ask why should a faculty member be able to put themselves in a position of directly competing with the institution. Would we allow, for example a faculty member who represents themselves as Penn State faculty to teach a course at Penn State and someplace else as well? And the answer is no. And so why would we allow that to happen in a courseware fashion. That’s really the net of the issue, and the argument is do we believe that that will do more to protect the institution or harm the institution. And I agree with your question that that really is the heart of it. It’s a negotiating stance and so we need to somehow balance the interests of faculty with the interest of the institution. This is an attempt to do this, and we welcome your input and any other input, so make sure we do get a copy of that.
John W. Bagby, Smeal College of Business Administration: Tom, I welcome this debate, and I’m very pleased to see that people are starting to do their homework, I understand how important the balance of these issues is. Actually, the Dutton Report started long ago, back I believe in 1995, and as was recounted here early on by Guy. The Dutton Report itself, a joint conference committee of the Senate Committee on Faculty Affairs and the Senate Committee on Research, and some floor debate are all available documents which I urge everyone to use as background, and set up against this new report. I’ve been told by the Senate Office that we hope to have those documents posted to the Senate web site, so that’s http://www.psu.edu/ufs, and then find your way to committees and the Senate Committee on Research, and hopefully in a week these documents will be available for you. In perusing them I think you’ll find the Dutton Report had three major points, and the first one was and apparently the most important was one of incentives, the second point was one about ownership and control, and the third point was about the financial split and about ad-hoc review process. The advisory/consultative report that was passed three years ago this month by this Senate and sent to the president is not all that different a report than the report that Tom and Guy have presented to us today. But I ask you to take a look at it, and make a comparison, because many issues stated in that advisory/consultative report are precisely these balancing problems that we’re facing right now. And not to take too much of your time, but I will give you quick laundry list--ownership and control clearly on the top, but attribution of authorship was there, the rights to do revisions, some aspects of non-competes of which there are many. There was a prediction about technological changes, and how rights might have to be conformed to those technological changes. There was this question of absorbing our expression into an invention mode, which it clearly seems to be coming to bear, and again, optimizing incentives. What I think I see in this document are a few new issues, and so I again ask you to go back to the old ones, and compare this new one, and let this start a debate. This new document I believe, has more sharply refined discussion of a couple of these issues. For example, questions of potential competition, and how we define markets, and particularly with respect to Penn State’s own resident and distance instruction. There is a clarification I found, that is an interesting commitment which we already had a number of sources for those obligations on us as faculty. There’s a mystery clearance process here, and really no mention of its accountability, but that seems like another important issue, and there is of course this form of a shopwrite, the free user at Penn State. There’s some question about local at the unit or central administration of this process, and we keep hearing about an implementation process of this as a general framework and guidelines to follow. I can tell you I’ve been part of an implementation process here, and I can assure you that sometimes those processes need some substantial work and review. And so, in sum, this has been around for a while, and it’s good that we’re all starting to worry about it, and there are documents out there that it would be helpful to review as we move forward. Thank you.
J. Christopher Carey, College of Medicine: I’m an employee of the Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, Incorporated. Does this policy apply to me? If it does apply to me, and is implemented such that 50 percent of the copyright belongs to someone else, does it belong to Penn State University or the Milton S. Hershey Medical Center? If the courseware is used outside of my course, does that limit it to the Milton S. Hershey Medical Center or at any of the campuses?
Thomas N. Jackson: When you teach that course, are you teaching it as a Penn State faculty member?
J. Christopher Carey: As far as I know I’m an employee of the Milton S. Hershey Medical Center.
Thomas N. Jackson: Dr. Pell?
Eva J. Pell, Vice-President for Research and Dean of the Graduate School: You’re an employee of Penn State University.
Chair Schengrund: But his salary comes 100 percent from the corporation.
Thomas N. Jackson: There may be a detail or two that needs to be…
Senators: Laughter.
J. Christopher Carey: There’s a firewall. Income is not shared between Penn State University and the corporation.
Thomas N. Jackson: John, is of course right about the implementation being a critical part of this. We know the Devil lives in the details and you don’t have the details in many cases. We can think of many questions like this. How do we handle joint projects between different institutions? How do we handle projects that are begun by a Penn State faculty member someplace else and brought back to Penn State? So I think these are the sorts of questions that really do need to be addressed, certainly as part of implementation, possibly as part of the guidelines themselves. Thank you.
Eva J. Pell: First of all, I want to thank all of you for your candor. For me this conversation is very interesting, and I have to say you know what they say about problems you walk around and everywhere you look you see it from a different perspective. This is a very big sphere, because I don’t feel like I’ve gotten around it yet, so this conversation is yet another very important part of the point for me. I also want to thank the committee who have really struggled with this, and we’ve had so many conversations and I think have tried very hard to come up with some balance. The one comment I want to make is there are a number of you that asked questions about the role of the administrative oversight committee. While I can’t tell you exactly how it will all come out, the longer you’ve gone with this, the more important I think that committee is going to be. Simply because we don’t have all the answers, and we could debate this forever and never come up with policy. I think this committee is going to help this policy to remain fluid and flexible, and I hope we can do that too, on a regular basis and to really live with the real examples. Mr. Myers asked the question, have there been examples and issues. There will be. I see this as a very active committee, a committee that I will probably participate in personally either as a member or to visit with regularly. I see a committee that will meet every month that will look at all the cases that come before us because this is the ultimate education that will help us to resolve all the kinds of issues that you are discussing. Thank you.
Chair Schengrund: Any other substantive and not previously discussed comments?
Tramble T. Turner: Tom, you indicated here concern with faculty rights and the continuing interest. A very general question, given what’s in the report how would you say your committee’s report articulates differences between the university as an institution and private corporations?
Thomas N. Jackson: I think the most important articulation is that we have tried to carve out a substantial area where the faculty is the boss. They own the material and they do with it as they see fit. And so, courseware modules, particularly those provided at no cost the faculty does what they want. If they develop a textbook they do what they want. Even those that need to be provided at minimal cost, you go to your department head and you say I have this, you know now you’re aware of it, we’re going to sell it for this amount, here’s why and it’s done. And that was something which at least at the beginning was not a forgone conclusion. My own view is that for most of us in the immediate future that’s where we will be living our lives. Now there certainly are important exceptions, and I don’t mean to be dismissive of those, but for the average faculty can we do the web pages that we need to do, can we do the course enhancements, can we do the electronic textbook things that make sense, can we do the electronic labs that make sense, and it was critically important for the committee that we provide freedom of action, and freedom of supervision, and freedom from unnecessary outside supervision for those activities.
Fred Schied, Adult Education: I’m the professor in charge of the Adult Education Program and we’re the ones that have a master’s degree online, this is our first year and the program has been extremely successful, we’re way ahead of World Campus projections, lots of students and so on. When we got involved with this I was naïve in the applied technological neophyte, and I thought it was a good idea, and I still think it’s a good idea in terms of providing access to quality education. But as with a lot of things you know, once you get into the actual development of it you start to realize the kinds of real issues that are at stake. I’d like to just say that in fact I think what we’re dealing with is an issue that will fundamentally change the relationship between professor and the university, and it’s not just me that I think, thinks that. In fact, the Center for Academic Transformation that did a major report on copyright issues says, “many institutions appear to have taken this approach so colleges and universities can quickly develop online courses since the school has the source of course content at hand, the individual faculty member. The sudden recognition of the faculty as resource to create tangible product is new”. Now this is the important quote and certainly something that I feel, “this new dynamic has broken the well established passive approval given to the faculty to sell original work as long as such selling does not interfere with fulfillment of the faculty’s teaching, research and service responsibilities”. So I think what we’re dealing with here is a potentially fundamentally different way of relating to the university. How does that work out in practice? Well I’ll give you two really kind of very minor examples to start thinking about, when you’re actually developing these courses. I figure part of our job is to get paid to teach, it’s one-third of our responsibility, so that every time I go into a face-to-face classroom, any kind of classroom I’m paid to do that. How does that work with World Campus and who owns that? Well, as long as I teach the class that I’ve developed then I get paid to teach it. What happens four or five years down the line if this course still gets taught by somebody else? So in effect then my expertise and my pedagogical approach is now being used by somebody else without any kind of enumeration to me. Plus, as Eva has pointed out the other issue because that courseware now belongs to the university and I’m talking about commissioned courseware, it seems to me in the document there is nothing that says who can make changes to that course. That you’ll be teaching this course and where the possibility exists that you’re going to be teaching this course five years from now, six years from now when it’s out of date. I have no control over that and the question is who has control? There’s another kind of little issue that I ran into and you don’t think about these things unless you get into it. In my field we have discussions that are professional meetings on teaching and what we do is we exchange technique strategies, exercises, cases, etc. I do several cases and exercises in my face-to-face class that I’m going to adapt for this online course. So the question I raise is well, now can I now share this when I go to these conferences? Can I say hey, here take a look at this to a professor from another university--from Rutgers or Columbia--can I share it? They are in competition with us. Or can I share only the face-to-face part but not the courseware part even though it’s built up one another or neither? So, even in terms of simple things like exchanging this, there’s problems. Do I have to ask for a university waiver to do that? I mean, those are substantial, substantial issues but I think there’s a bigger issue. And I think maybe some of you will think I may be overstating it but after experiencing it I don’t think so, and this is a quote from David Noble and this is where I think we really got problems Noble says, “Once faculty put their course material online the knowledge and course designs skill embedded in that material is taken out of their possession, transferred to the machinery and placed in the hands of the administration. The administration is now in a position to hire less skilled, and hence cheaper workers to deliver the technological pre-packaged course. It also allows the administration which claims ownership of this commodity to cover the course elsewhere without the original designers involvement or even knowledge much less financial interest. The buyers of this pre-packaged commodity meanwhile, are able to contract out and hence outsource the work of their own employees and thus reduce their reliance upon their in house teaching staff”. Now I really think that’s a worse case scenario however, it’s something we have to be aware of. What we’re dealing with here is a possibility for a fundamental change in the relationship of faculty at university. I strongly urge the Senate to consider Dr. Alison Carr-Chellman’s proposals to modify it and if it takes another year to do that, to really think this through, let’s take another year because this is serious business, and we’re looking at a different university and we’re looking at a fundamentally different relationship between faculty and administration. Thank you.
Thomas N. Jackson: Thanks for the comments. Certainly that’s something that the committee did think about and to put more succinctly maybe we have the university saying we’re going to re-use this without royalty, therefore, in the extreme view these courseware items are developed and the faculty go away and the courseware continues to run on its own. We rejected that because we put strong value on residential education, and we think that’s fundamentally without minimizing the value of online education that residential education will continue to be able to survive and continue to grow in the marketplace and we’ll do that by best implementing and using computer-based instruction with that residential instruction. So while we considered that concern, we left it at that point. Frankly, no policy will protect us from that if universities 50 years from now are all using machines; it didn’t matter what this policy said.
Brian B. Tormey, Penn State Altoona: I’d like to approach this from a slightly different perspective. In your proposal you indicated that the committee that will be appointed by the Vice President for Research and the Senate Chair would review the implementation phase. Is that review going to be subject to at least a review by the committee…their report going to be recommendations be made back to the full Senate for the Senate to view?
Thomas N. Jackson: The policy as it’s written puts the decision making in the hands of the Vice President for Research guided by this advisory committee, so the policy as written would not have each case go back through the Senate. Frankly, I think something like that would be unworkably time consuming to have to go through all those steps. It does mean that we’re investing a degree of trust in that administrator to act in the best interest of both the faculty and the institution guided by that committee.
Brian B. Tormey: Thank you for the clarification.
Chair Schengrund: Are there any other comments that are new and substantive? Would those of you who had written comments remember to give them to Tom before the end of the Senate meeting? You can either pass them in or however you’d like to do it, but make sure Tom gets them so that he can have them to look at and give them to the committee regardless of what the timetable is.
Thomas N. Jackson: If you have any trouble it’s tnj1@psu.edu and I welcome input.
Chair
Schengrund: Lou, you’ll be the final comment.
Louis Milakofsky, Berks-Lehigh Valley College: I know this is a policy statement, and therefore it minimizes examples. But just on the basis of how this special committee worked, how many examples did you look at in terms of what presently in the operating view of the university dealing with course modules and courseware, presently without this policy?
Thomas N. Jackson: You mean internal examples or external?
Louis Milakofsky: What are some of the…I mean did you spend a lot of time talking to faculty who have done this, mainly in the non-contracted area?
Thomas N. Jackson: Most of our input from faculty who are currently doing this was contracted individuals including Gary Miller on the committee representing the World Campus. We had some input from faculty who had developed projects on their own but most of the formal input was more things connected to the university. We also received input from the administration on how they viewed aspects of both of those.
Louis Milakofsky: So the committee is unaware of the relationship between the faculty member and the department in the non-contracted area?
Thomas N. Jackson: I don’t know that it would be fair to say we’re unaware. We certainly had less examples, more of the examples were anecdotal rather than specific. I did for example, contact several publishing companies and ask what arrangements they had made with not just Penn State faculty but faculty in general and those sorts of questions. But we did not have a lot of extensive input from individuals struggling with these problems.
Louis Milakofsky: May I suggest, based upon what that gentleman said on the corner that it might be a good idea to seek out…
Thomas N. Jackson: This is from the contracted side though, is it not?
Louis Milakofsky: …well that was a contract through the email on the non-contracted area because I think that’s a source of the problem in this policy the non-contracting…
Thomas N. Jackson: I would certainly welcome input from anybody that has concerns. If you have colleagues that have input to give, please have them send it to me.
Chair Schengrund: At this point I’d like to say thank you to Tom Jackson and his committee for the work that they’ve done and will be doing. And I’d like to thank the faculty for their input to the committee, because I’m sure this will probably result in their making a few changes to the document. Thank you. Under unfinished business the Committee on Committees and Rules brought forth a Revision to Bylaws, Article III, Section 4, it’s in Appendix “C” and it deals with the date by which the names of newly elected and newly appointed Senators should be reported to the Senate Office. This is a Bylaws change, it was on the Agenda last month and discussed last month it has sat on the table for the past month. If there are any further questions, I’m sure Deidre will be happy to answer them.
UNFINISHED BUSINESS
SENATE COMMITTEE ON COMMITTEES AND RULES
Revision
to Bylaws, Article III, Section 4
Deidre Jago, Chair, Senate Committee on Committees and Rules
Deidre E. Jago,
Hazleton Campus: I would just like to say that Secretary Bugyi
did say that we have had an increased number of the units who have reported
their newly elected faculty members, so we thank you for that. If your unit still has not conducted the
election please try to get the election conducted as soon as possible, because
there are multitudes of papers that have to be mailed out to the newly elected
individuals.
Chair Schengrund: Are there any questions for Deidre? If not, all those in favor of the proposed change, please signify by saying, "aye."
Senators: Aye.
Chair Schengrund: Any opposed, "nay"?
Senator: Nay.
Chair Schengrund: The aye’s have it and the motion is carried. And I did hear the “nay”. Under legislative reports we have a report from the Senate Committee on Curricular Affairs on A Clarification of “Active Learning” as it Applies to General Education and Louis Geschwindner will present this report.
LEGISLATIVE REPORTS
SENATE COMMITTEE ON CURRICULAR AFFAIRS
A Clarification of “Active Learning” as it Applies to General Education
Louis F. Geschwindner, Chair, Senate Committee on Curricular Affairs
Louis F. Geschwindner, College of Engineering: Thank you, Cara. Appendix “D” is the report from the Senate Committee on Curricular Affairs. You’ll note in the introduction that we appointed a special subcommittee to try and address the integration of active learning elements into the general education courses. The primary source of the information that we have to work from under the terms of approving courses and the faculty have in terms of proposing courses was found in what was called the “Framework for General Education” and in case you didn’t look to see what that was, that was the chart that we approved when we approved general education. There was a little box on the left-hand side that said active learning elements. And so the proposal that we have before us is really to change that little box, and the current is listed on the bottom of the first page of Appendix “D” and the proposed starts on the second page of Appendix “D”. And I want to emphasize that we have suggested a change in the name from active learning elements to core competencies, activities, and strategies for enhanced learning and added the statement that, “Knowledge domain courses must require each student to engage in activities promoting learning course content through practicing, typically, three or more of the following”. Now you’ll notice in the current it specifically says three or more of the following are to be integrated and the proposal says typically three or more. And in the rationale we’ve tried to explain that our intent here is to provide opportunities for faculty to identify the important active learning elements, make an active learning component in the course, and not be so concerned about counting whether you’ve got three of these things or two of those things or just how you’re going to count the number. We wanted to broaden it up. We are emphasizing the inclusion of active participation in all of the things that are associated with that course. The committee hopes that you will all agree that this is an improvement, particularly those faculty who are still working on course proposals, that this will help you to further develop those courses, and get us moving forward in the general education approval process, and I’d be happy to answer any questions that I can.
Dennis S. Gouran, College of the Liberal Arts: What assurance do we have that under this more flexible scheme, that people are not going to say if in the course proposal that two of the active learning elements for core competencies now are going to be emphasized in contradiction to what is typically the case of three or more. It seems to me that a lot of people have trouble with the location of the presumption of who is best equipped to judge that the individual course satisfies the required competencies. So could you give us some assurance that when we come through with a two or three…
Louis F. Geschwindner: No, I cannot assure you that the proposal that a faculty member puts forward will be approved…
Dennis S. Gouran: I didn’t ask that…
Louis F. Geschwindner: The intent here is to provide you with the opportunity. Now, if a current course proposal comes through and it identifies three things that are active learning, one of the problems we’ve had is trying to figure out whether that’s really active learning. Some proposals come through that writing an essay exam because it’s writing is active learning and the committee has a hard time with that. But if we’re talking about you know, the numbers of things…if a proposal comes through with two different things but some large percentage of the course is involved with active learning in one area then two should be sufficient. You shouldn’t have to count up to three in order to make it an active learning component of the course, so we’re trying to provide faculty with an opportunity to tell us, here is where the active learning elements are in this course.
Dennis S. Gouran: Well, in the newly added one that is course specific, again can a faculty member make a presumption that he or she is better equipped than people who don’t teach the course to determine what is course specific competency?
Louis F. Geschwindner: I think the committee would assume that, but we cannot approve something that isn’t explained. And the biggest problem is that faculty have not been explaining how they are doing their active learning elements. Certainly the committee is not in a position to judge whether in an engineering course using calculus is the appropriate level to be teaching that course. That’s something that the faculty who’s proposing the course is going to decide. I use engineering because that’s far enough away from general education. We’re not going to tell you that what you really ought to be using is speaking as the active learning element in that class, because that’s not our position. But if you are going to be using speaking, then tell us how you’re doing it, don’t just say we’re going to do speaking in this class. Tell us what you’re doing, how its an active learning element in that particular class and frankly, we’ve approved…I think there are only three courses that have ever been turned down, and you can find all of this on the Faculty Senate web page. You can see all the courses that have been proposed, you can see all of them have been approved as I said except for three, you can see the proposals that all the colleges have made as to when they would put their proposals in to be approved and hopefully, down the road we’ll have a report on just what kind of progress we’re making on that.
Semyon Slobounov,
College of Health and Human Development:
Can you provide me with one
example of inactive learning? Is it
possible that…
Louis F. Geschwindner: That’s probably what we’re doing
here…
Semyon
Slobounov: I think that this is not possible without actually…
Louis F. Geschwindner: I don’t have first hand
experience, but I understand that there are classes with 700 people, where the
only activity that the student participates in, in that class, is walking into
the room. Now I don’t have personal
experience with that, but there apparently are many examples around the
university where the students are not taking much involvement in their
learning…
Semyon Slobounov:
They’re not learning.
Louis F. Geschwindner: They may not be learning, they
may answer a multiple choice test, they may or may not have read the homework,
the reading assignments, they may or may not have ever gotten to talk to the
person next to them about what’s going on in the course, so they are
there. I would say that the general
education subcommittee doesn’t have a preconceived idea…it would be very easy
if we had a list you know, if we could say, “okay, now everybody’s got to do
this, every course has to have three times when the student gets on the
Internet and looks for something in the library, three times when they get on
the Internet and they look for something that comes from this particular
foreign country or they have to write two papers that have to be five pages and
if it’s four pages,” we don’t have those kinds of things and that’s why we rely
on the faculty to tell us what they think active learning is for their
particular course. The committee
members are always happy to talk to you about the kinds of discussions that we
have as we look over these proposals.
The difficulty is always in figuring out what the faculty member is
trying to tell us they are doing, because they aren’t really that clear. And one of the comments was made this
morning at the Senate Committee on Curricular Affairs about the fact that faculty
sometimes can’t write very well.
P. Peter Rebane, Penn
State Abington: Let me ask you a question on the rationale
on the last part and just for my information.
It says here that, “A successful general education course typically will
involve students in several active-learning activities”. Who defines what is a successful general
education course? The committee when it
approves it or not? And it goes on
further, “evidence of significant involvement by students is more important
than count of activities”. Who
determines that significant of involvement?
And how do we find out that activities that promote intercultural/
international competence are especially valuable? Do these criteria come in when the committee judges to approve a
course for inclusion as gen ed or not?
Because otherwise how would we know it’s successful? I may make a course that I think, “gee,
writing and collaborative learning works out,” but it turns out to be a dud,
because maybe that particular course doesn’t lend itself to that. I’m just curious whether this is a monthly
probe for getting approval or is there some feedback that one gets? Thank you.
Louis F. Geschwindner: Well, I think the general idea is that those are things that the Senate voted on when they approved general education. The Senate, when it approved general education said active learning is important to a general education course at this university. The problem that we’re trying to deal with now is, how do we get the courses re-certified, how do we get those active learning elements in it. It seems that people were getting very hung up on this number three. It also was difficult for some folks to look at the five bulleted items in the old active learning elements, and identify them as active learning elements, okay. Many people looked at it and saw three active learning elements and two others, and so the rationale here is saying that we want to move away from the counting and emphasize active learning, and let the faculty who are making the proposal, the faculty that are teaching the course put in the active learning elements that they think are going to make that course successful. Now we do have again, within the general education approved program and assessment activity, that’s where we are going to find out I guess whether or not all of these things have been successful. That’s not moved along far enough yet to have any significant feedback on whether putting active learning in your history class has improved that class or not.
Tramble T. Turner: To go back to that last sentence in rationale, that my colleague just asked about. It seems that does lay out some clear criteria that these two points are definitely valued by this particular committee, however you referred to when the Senate voted on the general education legislation, as best I recall the various elements of active learning that were listed in that report were listed as equal elements for faculty to choose among. But this last phrase in the rationale seems to change the intent of that.
Louis F. Geschwindner: No I don’t think it was intended to change the intent. It was intended to sort of bridge the gap from a list of non-active things, okay. In what was passed by the Senate we have the active use of writing, speaking and so on, we have the opportunity for information gathering and the engagement in collaborative learning. Then we have two other things, which didn’t really fit in as activity kinds of things. And so what we’re trying to say here is that these have been decided by the Senate to be important things. The Senate, since they made two out of those original five, made those things that they wanted to see incorporated in courses as much as they could. And so we’re simply, in the rationale emphasizing that that’s why they are still there, because they are important.
John J. Cahir, Vice
Provost for Undergraduate Education: First of all, I want to offer praise to you
and to the committee for moving in the direction away from what might be called
bureaucratic list counting, to really trying to address the intent of the
Senate. And I think when it did vote
the general education program several years ago did a wonderful job of not
getting into a turf war over what people should be taking but rather what
should be the quality of the learning experience for the undergraduates taking
general education courses. I think this
is really going to promote that, and so as a friend I would like to offer a
slight…
Senators:
Laughter.
John J. Cahir: Well
I notice there’s no reference at all in this to quantitative thinking and I
know it was talked about but I want to offer a small amendment to just say in
the synthesis and analysis quote to change the wording to say, “the application
of reasoning, interpretative methods, and quantitative thinking,” and I would
even underline the thinking. And I
would just offer two examples in fact, on election night quantitative thinking
might have been fine and in fact we could even help the people in Harrisburg
understand the difference between 0.68 percent, 3 percent or even 4.25 percent.
Louis F. Geschwindner: Well all the folks that were laughing when John started were people who were at the Senate Committee on Curricular Affairs this morning or at Officers and Chairs last night when I announced that I would refuse to accept any friendly amendments. And so, if you want to make that a motion, John that the Senate can vote on it, but it was a conscience decision on the part of the committee to not include quantitative, because we felt that that statement was broad enough as it is, and included everything including quantitative, and any other kind of thinking and reasoning and synthesis and analysis, that you can come up with. So it was not an intent to reduce that, or eliminate that from the thinking, but to simplify the thing. So if you want to make it as a motion and let the Senate vote on it, that’s fine but we won’t accept it as a friendly amendment.
John J. Cahir: Well, I think is should be voted on, so I offer it as an amendment.
Chair Schengrund: Okay, that’s what I needed to hear. Could I have a second?
Senator: Second.
Chair
Schengrund: Is there any discussion on the proposed amendment that adds the words,
“and quantitative thinking”?
Kim C. Steiner,
College of Agricultural Sciences: Adds the words and quantitative thinking to
which bullet?
Chair Schengrund: It
would be the third bullet down that starts with synthesis and analysis in
problem solving and critical thinking, including, where appropriate, the
application of reasoning, interpretive methods, and quantitative thinking. And so my guess is it would read actually
the application of reasoning, interpretive methods, and quantitative thinking.
Alison Carr-Chellman: Cara you just said interpretive
methods and it’s interpretative in there.
Chair
Schengrund: I’m sorry interpretative my…
Alison Carr-Chellman:
Interpretative really
doesn’t mean that much so that’s an actual word. I think interpretive is the actual word, so an amendment to the
amendment perhaps.
Chair Schengrund: I
think that would just be a correction of the spelling.
Louis F. Geschwindner: That’s a friendly amendment I’ll
accept.
Senators:
Laughter.
Chair Schengrund: It’s deleting an “and,” and adding after methods, and quantitative thinking. Is there any other discussion? If not, all those in favor of the proposed change, please signify by saying, "aye."
Senators: Aye.
Chair Schengrund: Any opposed, "nay"?
Senators: Nay.
Chair Schengrund: The aye’s have it, the motion is carried. Is there any more discussion now on the amended document? If not, all those in favor of the report, please signify by saying, "aye."
Senators: Aye.
Chair Schengrund: Any opposed, "nay"? The aye’s have it, the motion is carried. Thank you, Lou.
Louis F. Geschwindner: Thank you very much.
Chair
Schengrund: Don’t leave just because we’ve finished legislative reports, there’s more
to come. Under advisory/consultative
reports, from the Senate Committee on Outreach Activities there is a
Recommendation to Refine and Expand the Models for Recognition of Outreach
Activities and that’s given in Appendix “E” and Harvey Manbeck and Patricia
Book will present this.
ADVISORY/CONSULTATIVE REPORTS
SENATE COMMITTEE ON OUTREACH ACTIVITIES
Recommendation to Refine and Expand the Models for Recognition of Outreach Activities
Harvey B. Manbeck, Chair, Senate Committee on Outreach Activities
Harvey B. Manbeck, College of Agricultural Sciences: The report in Appendix “E” is an outcome of the advisory and consultative report on the Engagement of Faculty in Outreach that was first presented to the Senate on February 1, 2000. That report was subsequently returned to the committee for reconsideration. The Senate Committee on Outreach Activities has discussed and revised that report since that time. The committee thinks that the current report is more concise and succinct than the original report. For example, it’s condensed to five pages versus 17 in the original report that was sent back and we have one recommendation versus the seven that were in the original document. The recommendation in the current advisory/consultative report before you today focuses on what the Senate Committee on Outreach Activities feels is the key issue to encouraging engagement of faculty in outreach activities. That being recognition of outreach scholarship at all levels of faculty review and across all colleges of the university. The recommendation in the report is intended to be supportive of the Senate Committee on Faculty Affairs as it considers the recommendations of the UniSCOPE report that was reported on last Faculty Senate meeting. The recommendation is further intended to promote appropriate recognition of those faculty who are currently involved in outreach scholarship and to provide encouragement to those faculty who would like to become engaged in outreach scholarship.
Gordon F. De Jong, College of the Liberal Arts: I have a comment and a question. My comment is that in regards to service in outreach scholarship activity I think there are three controlling factors in this order of their importance. One, disciplinary paradigms; two, departmental cultures; and, three tenure and promotion. My question is on the third sentence when you say…fourth word from the end when you say review I take it that this recommendation is only about levels of faculty review for tenure and promotion? And if that is correct, I’m going to argue that in the absence of having recommendations that deal with the first two are why I just articulated that this will have only marginal effects if any. And in some departments and in some disciplinary paradigms will in fact be counterproductive to tenure and promotion particularly of junior faculty.
Harvey B. Manbeck: While the comment on “at all levels of review across colleges and departments,” that “all levels of review” is not only related to the promotion and tenure issue, it also deals with annual faculty reviews. That’s what the intent of that phrase was.
Gordon F. De Jong: So this is in fact…the word in front of that a faculty review? All of this recommendation is about faculty reviews?
Harvey B. Manbeck: Yes it is.
Gordon F. De Jong: I think that’s very important because you’re not saying anything about unit reviews, you’re not saying anything about trying to change paradigms, you’re not dealing with the issues that the Humanities versus Agriculture see things very differently in regard to service and outreach. You’re not saying anything about departments and units and the fact that if you are at the campuses you have much different contracts and expectations versus if you are in other units. So if this is only targeted at faculty review, yes?
Harvey B. Manbeck: This is for faculty reviews across the university, yes.
Gordon F. De Jong: And you feel that this will assist the entire…
Harvey B. Manbeck: Well the committee feels that an expression from the Senate in support of this recommendation would lend support to the Senate Committee on Faculty Affairs as they review expansion or revision of models for evaluation of faculty scholarship and then particularly to remind them that or to keep in front of it the importance of outreach activities in those models.
Gordon F. De Jong: I have to say I disagree.
Jacob De Rooy, Penn State Harrisburg: I urge the support of this recommendation. I think this is a very important first step. I applaud the initiative of the Senate Committee on Outreach Activities with having presented this document again. As one of the authors of last year’s document which was I admit too long, I think that you did skip some very important recommendations that we should consider at a later point. Oiling down seven recommendations into one may have been more of a service of those readers who lips tire easily. The fact of the matter is that you have missed some very big points. I think you did capture a very important one in stating that we need to strengthen our assessment models of scholarship because that report would identify that as one of the most critical issues last year. That in fact, it’s not that our promotion and tenure duties wish to ignore outreach or put it on the back burner. It is simply they don’t have the tools for an analytical evaluation that they have with conventional forms of scholarship and that’s very, very important that you bring that to our attention. So I urge the passage of this legislation however, I strongly suggest that the Senate Committee on Outreach Activities re-visit some of those recommendations from last year, particularly with respect to the importance of changing the culture of the administration. For example, and this is an anecdotal evidence that I will not give any names for. Recently in a correspondence regarding contract research being done in outreach activity by Penn State a budget administrator put in writing the statement, “that, that primarily benefited the sponsor and should not be considered in any way as germane indeed with compensation or salary reviews of the faculty members involved”. Now I think…I’m not pinpointing any one administrator but I think that’s the crux of the problem. That we hear a lot of good preaching about outreach from the president and the provost but when it boils down to the level of the deans and the associate deans and the department heads, we have made no progress in that line. So I urge that as being your next step in the progression of promoting outreach but indeed this is a modest first step, but please don’t let it be the final one.
Chair Schengrund: Are there any other comments or questions? Seeing none, I’d like to call for a vote. All those in favor, please signify by saying, "aye."
Senators: Aye.
Chair Schengrund: Any opposed, "nay"? The aye’s have it, the motion is carried. Thank you very much. Moving on to informational reports, we’ll have two coming forth from the Senate Committee on Computing and Information Systems. I’ll ask Sam Slobounov to come forward and present the first one on Student Computing Initiative which is found in Appendix “F”.
INFORMATIONAL REPORTS
SENATE COMMITTEE ON COMPUTING AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS
Student Computing
Initiative
Semyon Slobounov, Chair, Senate Committee on Computing and Information Systems
Semyon Slobounov: Thank you, Chair and Senators. I would like to introduce John Harwood a committee member to join me for this informational report. As you probably remember there was quite a debate regarding computer ownership among freshmen students last year. John was the one that actually initiated the computer initiative programs and he is primary author of this report. So I share responsibility and John would answer any questions if you wish so. Thank you.
Chair Schengrund: Are there any questions? Seeing none, I’ll just say thank you. We’ll move on to your next one, Sam, don’t
go away.
SENATE COMMITTEE ON COMPUTING AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS
Information
Technology Fee Overview for FY 2000-2001
Semyon Slobounov, Chair, Senate Committee on Computing and Information Systems
Semyon Slobounov: We have one more report and it’s computer
fee, again that was a request from the Senate and again John Harwood was the
initiator of this report and we have an informational report that is computer
fee. You have a number, you have some
distribution, if you have a question John is available for answers.
Wayne R. Curtis: I
just wanted to make a comment and that is a lot of universities
have gone to distributing computing as opposed to a circumstance like we have
in tact. And it’s clear that a lot of
unit resources are going into still a centralized computing which is different
than many other schools in the Big Ten.
I was wondering if there’s any comment about interpreting this in terms
of the value, where this money is going as opposed to it going to units and
having less centralized computing services.
John T. Harwood,
College of the Liberal Arts: The question is not really about how the
fees are distributed, the question is really the model or the philosophy of
computing at Penn State. But what I
would say in answering is that the model for computing at Penn State has changed
dramatically in 20 years, 10 years, the last main frame went out the door last
summer. And so in fact, there is an
enormous amount of computing that occurs in colleges, departments and centrally
and I think it would be probably worth a separate informational report that
would describe those kinds of things. I
think certainly from a central computing perspective we’re eager to provide the
services that faculty and students need.
And to build it in such a way as that they would get the appropriate
kinds of resources but that’s really separate from the computer fee itself.
Chair
Schengrund: Are there any other questions?
Seeing none, thank you very much.
Moving on to the next report is the Annual Report for 1999-2000 of the
Senate Committee on Faculty Rights and Responsibilities Committee. The information can be found in Appendix “H”
and the report will be presented by Gary Fosmire.
SENATE COMMITTEE ON FACULTY RIGHTS AND RESPONSIBILITIES
Annual Report for 1999-2000
James M. Rambeau, Chair, Faculty Rights and Responsibilities
Gary J. Fosmire, College of Health and Human Development: Well you have the report before you. I hope it’s clear and self-explanatory and I’d be happy to entertain any questions.
Jacob De Rooy: Gary it’s a great report. I served on this committee and it’s a wonderful committee and I wish everybody had a chance to serve at least a year on it, it’s very constructive. But I noticed over the last several years that the annual reports have always been written in the first person singular. This is a practice started by a well known predecessor who is now retired. I’m just wondering whether in fact, it would be more appropriate to use first person plural in future reports unless there is a justification for its current usage.
Gary J. Fosmire: I will admit that I followed the reports that had been produced previously. One of them by myself last year when I chaired the committee and the year before, both. I think your point is well taken and I’ll suggest to the current chair that we change the format.
Leonard J. Berkowitz, York Campus: Two things--one I also served on this committee and I found it the most frustrating experience in my years of service. Because we found cases where it was clear that unjust things had occurred, and the committee had no recourse whatsoever because we were restricted to procedural problems. I really would urge that committee and perhaps the Senate Committee on Faculty Affairs consider whether we need something further. And the second thing that made me think about this is in your second to last paragraph where you refer to a particular case where the Provost’s Office did not support the recommendations and the Senate Committee on Faculty Rights and Responsibilities could offer other solutions. You do not say whether the Senate Committee on Faculty Rights and Responsibilities found those alternative solutions satisfactory?
Gary J. Fosmire: Interesting point and I guess we didn’t actually take that up. There may have been some measure of exhaustion in the committee. This was a case that actually persisted under our attention for about 18 months, and when the provost ruled in the way he did it was to say this is a closed case. We are finished with this case now. So, we agreed to that but we did not directly in our committee meeting subsequent to that, talk about how we felt about it, I guess. If that answers the question then?
Chair Schengrund: Are there any other questions or comments? If not, thank you. Okay, Senate Committee on Outreach Activities. You’re going to introduce Diane?
SENATE COMMITTEE ON OUTREACH ACTIVITIES
Penn State Alumni Association
Harvey B. Manbeck, Chair, Senate Committee on Outreach Activities
George A. Lesieutre, College of Engineering: I’m George Lesieutre from Engineering representing the Senate Committee on Outreach Activities. Good afternoon everyone. The Senate Committee on Outreach Activities brings this report to the Senate today for a couple of reasons. First of all, as far as we can tell it’s been more than a decade since a representative of the Penn State Alumni Association has been invited to speak to us here and we thought it was high time. We feel that the Alumni Association is an important component of the university and that faculty need to be aware of its activities. Second we believe that the alumni association presents avenues for outreach that remain to be explored. We hope that one outcome of today’s presentation and this informational report is that some of you will get some ideas to carry forward with you and influence what you may do in the future. It’s my pleasure to introduce the Executive Director of the Penn State Alumni Association, Diane Ryan and I would like to thank her for being so patient with all the preceding that have preceded her.
Diane Ryan, Executive Director, Penn State Alumni Association: Thank you to those of you that remain and I will be brief. I hope you take the time to read the report that you have in front of you and I hope you take some time to log onto our web site, and to our portal site to get some more information because there’s a lot going on all over the state. Sometimes you can learn a lot about an organization by understanding the background of the person who leads that organization. My 21 years with Penn State including 11 years at the Wilkes-Barre Campus span a wide variety of roles from DUS advisor to FTCAP coordinator, to student activities, even Faculty Ombudsman for a time. So it was only natural that one of my goals as executive director would be to weave the association more tightly into the fabric of the university committee through some very critical alliances. Most Alumni Associations throughout the country have developed partnerships with athletics. It’s a relatively easy alliance to build with the support of alumni and you’ll see signs of our support here on campus in the Bryce Jordan Center, Beaver Stadium and the ice arena and many other places. But I’m most proud of the fact that we worked very hard to build alliances with other critical areas of the university--Student Affairs, Outreach and Cooperative Extension and the academic community. Our support of students extends from over $2 million in endowed undergraduate scholarships, graduate fellowships, undergraduate study abroad awards to the support of mentoring and networking programs, student organizations and facilities such as the new Career Center, the HUB Robeson Center and the Paterno Library. My staff meets on a quarterly basis with William Asbury’s staff to help coordinate our efforts for maximum effectiveness. We jointly support an office of Alumni Career Services which is based in Boucke Building. With Outreach and Cooperative Extension we jointly fund and operate an office of Alumni Education which supports the development and marketing of credit and non-credit courses from every college to alumni around the world. We directly affect classroom enrichment through the Alumni Fellow Program which recognizes alumni who have distinguished themselves and are willing to bring that expertise into the classroom. Twenty-two new alumni fellows have recently been selected to participate next fall. The leadership of the association is probably most proud of the recent funding of a second teaching fellow endowment assuring that each year two faculty members--one from University Park and one from another location--would be recognized. The new teaching fellows for 2001-2002 are Gita Talmage, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Eric Corty, Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology from Penn State Erie, The Behrend College. This is your Alumni Association, whether you’re a graduate or not. You have direct representation, the Chair of the Faculty Senate is one of 18 board members on the Executive Board of Alumni Council. All association policy and financial decisions are made by this governing board. The chair regularly reports to the board and the council on issues being addressed by the Faculty Senate. While we have accomplished much, there is so much more to be done. Expectations of alumni have never been greater or more demanding. We are challenged to preserve the traditions of the class of ’47 while struggling to meet the online and the networking needs of the class of 2000. At the end of March we’ll be moving into the new Hintz Family Alumni Center. This 30,000 square foot addition to a refurbished University House will provide a home for alumni to gather and interact with faculty, staff and students. We also see this new venue as a perfect setting for small seminars, exhibits and performances. I’ve already been contacted by many of you regarding exhibition or programming ideas in this wonderful building. We need you, I not only welcome I strongly encourage your involvement and your collaboration in helping us connect with and serve over 400,000 alumni and 145,000 dues paying members. You can help make a Penn State education a lifelong experience. Thank you very much.
Senators: Applause.
Chair Schengrund: Thank you, Diane. I might add that as you all know the president is in Harrisburg today hopefully, convincing the legislature that they want to support us and I know at least in the Harrisburg area, and in the Harrisburg Patriot, the Alumni Association had a full page ad pointing out the things that has occurred over a time span and how Penn State had increased various things, and it was very well done. And it was basically the chart that had appeared in the Intercom on the first page, on the right-hand side on top of a picture of, I think it was Old Main, I’m not sure you can correct me, in the Intercom. It was a very well done ad with the Nittany Lion in the center and then all the points underneath, very clear, very simple and very direct. When the students came on December 5, 2000 and let us know that they were a little upset with the diversity issues on this campus, December 19, 2000--the Alumni Council has a Diversity Subcommittee--and that subcommittee met and one of their suggestions dealt with putting the diversity component back into orientation. And this is something that I’m not quite sure how the students have come to accept, but the students have come to accept as something that they think would be a very good idea. So that they provide a lot of very practical support in many ways to us here at Penn State, so thank you. The next report is from the Senate Committee on Undergraduate Education. It is the Grade Distribution Report, and it’s Appendix “J” and Jamie Myers will present it.
SENATE COMMITTEE ON UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION
Grade
Distribution Report
Jamie M. Myers, Chair, Senate Committee on Undergraduate Education
Jamie M. Myers: I hope everyone didn’t stay because they’re burning mad about grade inflation. As our committee looked at the numbers in this report, you know we were tempted to conclude that there is something called grade inflation occurring. Particularly, if you look at the numbers over the last decade where we have a stable policy in terms of the late drop and withdrawal times. There seems to be a little bit of a creep in the distribution towards the high side. If you look over the years, the average GPA for 0 to 499 courses, the average GPA in 1975 was 2.75 and if you look at the average then this year--it’s in Table 2, page 2--that is 2.92. So over 25 years going from 2.75 to 2.92 is the average GPA which is a slight increase. We don’t know whether that’s a statistically significant increase and yet within that it does appear that if you look at the last 10 years of the distribution there is some slighting around towards the upper end of the grades. Now I’m going to share with you what our committee thought. We thought some factors that might be involved is that there may be more use of projects and papers by faculty than there are traditional exams which have a quantitative score. And exams tend by the psychometrics involved to discriminate more, and spread peoples’ grades out more on the normal curve. With projects and papers, it might also accompany a movement and education towards more criterion based or performance based assessments. Where if students achieve the knowledge performance goal, or the objective then they get the good grade. Whereas, that’s different than taking everybody’s score in a test, and pushing it into a normal curve where you have a certain percentage of “D”s and “F”s equal to “A”s and “B”s, with the most in the middle at the “C” range. We have indications that admission scores and SATs are increasing. That might account for increased grades. We have better students, right? We have the suggestion that majors are introducing GPA requirements for entrance and exit, so they are increasing the bar, so the students have to be more concerned and work to get higher grades in order to actually get into some majors that have controls. We also had a suggestion that faculty might read this report each year and see that grades are creeping up, so they grade higher as well. The report itself might have some effect. There also was a suggestion that perhaps faculty promote PSU graduates by having graduates with higher GPAs, it makes them more competitive in the market. We struggled as a committee on how we might operationalize and actually correlate any of these factors and some others perhaps, with higher grades. We weren’t sure exactly what numbers we would use in some statistical process to try to pin down the factors that might account for grade inflation, so we did not pursue any type of analysis and for another reason we decided not to pursue that analysis, that if we did identify a factor what really would we do about it? Would we tell people, “I’m sorry but you can’t do that any more, you must no longer grade in that way,” or something like that. So that’s why the report has no extensive analysis on the issue of grade inflation. Thank you for the lengthy introduction.
Chair Schengrund: Are there any questions or comments? None?
Jamie M. Myers: That’s great.
Chair Schengrund: Okay, then I’ll just say thank you, Jamie and maybe it’s good to wait until 3:30.
NEW LEGISLATIVE BUSINESS
None
COMMENTS AND RECOMMENDATIONS FOR THE
GOOD OF THE UNIVERSITY
None
ADJOURNMENT
May I have a motion to adjourn? The February 27, 2001 meeting of the University Faculty Senate adjourned at 3:36 PM.
DOCUMENTS DISTRIBUTED PRIOR TO FEBRUARY 27, 2001
Committees and Rules – Revision of Bylaws, Article III,
Section 4 (Legislative)
Computing and Information Systems – Information Technology Fee Overview for FY 2000/2001 (Informational)
Computing and Information Systems – Student Computing Initiative (Informational)
Curricular Affairs – A Clarification of “Active Learning” as it Applies to General Education (Legislative)
Curricular Affairs - Curriculum Report of February 13, 2001
Faculty Rights and Responsibilities – Annual Report for 1999-2000 (Informational)
Outreach Activities – Penn State Alumni Association (Informational)
Outreach Activities – Recommendation to Refine and Expand the
Models for Recognition of Outreach Activities (Advisory/Consultative)
Research – Courseware Policy (Forensic)
Undergraduate Education – Grade Distribution Report (Informational)
C O R R E C T E D C O P Y
SENATE
COMMITTEE ON CURRICULAR AFFAIRS
A Clarification of “Active Learning” as it Applies to General Education
(Legislative)
(Implementation
Date: Upon passage by the Senate)
Introduction:
During Summer 2000, Dr. Louis Geschwindner, Chair of the Faculty Senate Committee on Curricular Affairs (SCCA), appointed the Active-Learning Advisory Committee (ALAC) to review and advise the SCCA on Recommendation #4 from the Report of the Special Committee on General Education. Specifically, the charge for the ALAC was to provide recommendations to SCCA to facilitate improved integration of the “key competencies for active learning” into General Education courses.
As a result of several meetings and on-going discussions during Fall Semester 2000, the ALAC recommended that no modification should take place to Recommendation #4 of the Report of the Special Committee on General Education. However, ALAC recommended that the SCCA consider presenting a motion to the Faculty Senate to modify and broaden the “Framework for General Education” at Penn State in order to clarify the concept of student-centered learning. The SCCA accepted the recommendation of ALAC and makes this recommendation to the University Faculty Senate.
Recommendation:
That the section concerning “Active
Learning Elements” of the “Framework for General Education” be changed as
follows:
Current:
ACTIVE LEARNING ELEMENTS
Three or more of the following are to be integrated into courses offered in the
knowledge domains:
A. active use of writing, speaking and other
forms of self-expression,
B. opportunity for information gathering,
synthesis and analysis in solving problems (including the use of library, electronic/computer
and other resources and quantitative reasoning and interpretation, as
applicable),
C. engagement in collaborative learning and
teamwork,
D. application of intercultural and
international competence,
E.
dialogue
pertaining to social behavior, community and scholarly conduct.
Proposed:
CORE COMPETENCIES, ACTIVITIES, AND STRATEGIES FOR
ENHANCED LEARNING
KNOWLEDGE DOMAIN COURSES MUST REQUIRE EACH STUDENT TO ENGAGE IN ACTIVITIES
PROMOTING LEARNING COURSE CONTENT THROUGH PRACTICING, TYPICALLY, THREE OR MORE
OF THE FOLLOWING:
·
WRITING,
SPEAKING AND/OR OTHER FORMS OF SELF-EXPRESSION,
·
INFORMATION
GATHERING, SUCH AS THE USE OF THE LIBRARY, COMPUTER/ELECTRONIC RESOURCES, AND
EXPERIMENTATION OR OBSERVATION,
·
SYNTHESIS AND
ANALYSIS IN PROBLEM SOLVING AND CRITICAL THINKING, INCLUDING, WHERE
APPROPRIATE, THE APPLICATION OF REASONING, AND INTERPRETIVE METHODS, AND QUANTITATIVE THINKING,
·
COLLABORATIVE
LEARNING AND TEAMWORK,
·
ACTIVITIES THAT
PROMOTE AND ADVANCE INTERCULTURAL AND/OR INTERNATIONAL UNDERSTANDING,
·
ACTIVITIES THAT
PROMOTE THE UNDERSTANDING OF ISSUES PERTAINING TO SOCIAL BEHAVIOR, SCHOLARLY
CONDUCT, AND COMMUNITY RESPONSIBILITY,
·
A SIGNIFICANT
ALTERNATIVE COMPETENCY FOR ACTIVE LEARNING DESIGNED FOR AND APPROPRIATE TO A
SPECIFIC COURSE.
Rationale:
Students should be actively
involved in a significant part of their own learning in all General Education
courses at Penn State. Through the use
of active learning in assignments, exercises, and other formal activities
associated with a course, students become engaged participants in the
particular course's content and, simultaneously, build competencies, skills,
and abilities that are necessary to promote learning in any situation.
A
successful General Education course typically will involve students in several
active-learning activities, not all of the same type. However, evidence of significant involvement by students is more
important than the count of activities. Activities that promote
intercultural and international competence, or that help students assess social
behavior and scholarly conduct in the community, are especially valuable.
ACTIVE-LEARNING ADVISORY COMMITTEE
TO THE COMMITTEE ON CURRICULAR AFFAIRS
OF THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY SENATE
Richard Alley
Christopher Bise, Chair
Barton Browning
Donald Fahnline
William Kelly
Diane Zabel
SENATE COMMITTEE ON CURRICULAR
AFFAIRS
Phyllis Adams
Alison Altman
R. Thomas Berner
Douglas K. Brown
Barton Browning
Garry Burkle
Robert Crane
Brian Curran
Jennifer Flinchbaugh
Gary J. Fosmire
George W. Franz
Louis Geschwindner, Chair
Sally Heffentreyer
J. Daniel Marshall, Vice Chair
Kathleen Mastrian
Robert Minard
Robert Novack
Judy Ozment Payne
Sheila E. Ridley
Howard Sachs
Richard J. Simons
Shelley Stoffels
James Thomas
Rodney Troester
Diane Zabel
THE FOLLOWING SENATORS WERE IN
ATTENDANCE AT THE
FEBRUARY 27, 2001
SENATE MEETING
Achterberg,
Cheryl L.
Adams, Phyllis F.
Alexander, Shelton S.
Ambrose, Anthony
Ammon, Richard I.
Andaleeb, Syed S.
Atkinson, Ann J.
Aydin, Kultegin
Bagby, John W.
Baggett, Connie D.
Barbato, Guy F.
Bardi, John F.
Barnes, David
Beaupied, Aida M.
Berkowitz, Leonard J.
Bittner, Edward W.
Blasko, Dawn G.
Blood, Ingrid M.
Blumberg, Melvin
Bollard, Edward R., Jr.
Book, Patricia A.
Borhan, Ali
Brozellino, Joseph E.
Bower, Phillip R.
Bridges, K. Robert
Brown, Douglas K.
Burchard, Charles L.
Burkhart, Keith K.
Cahir, John J.
Caldwell, Linda L.
Calvert, Clay
Cardamone, Michael J.
Carey, J. Christopher
Carpenter, Lynn A.
Casteel, Mark A.
Cecere, Joseph J.
Chellman, Alison C.
Chirico, JoAnn
Christy, David P.
Clark, Paul F.
Curran, Brian A.
Curtis, Wayne R.
Davis, Dwight
DeCastro, W. Travis
Deines, Peter
DeJong, Gordon F.
DeRooy, Jacob
Diehl, Renee D.
Donovan, James M.
Elder, James T.
Ellis, Bill
Engelder, Terry
Esposito, Jacqueline R.
Fedeli, Marcus A.
Filson, Loren
Flinchbaugh, Jennifer
Fosmire, Gary J.
Foti, Veronique M.
Frank, Thomas A.
Frank, William M.
Franz, George W.
Fullerton, Erika
Galligan, M. Margaret
Garwacki, Joseph
Georgopulos, Peter D.
Geschwindner, Louis F.
Gilmour, David S.
Golden, Lonnie M.
Goldman, Margaret B.
Gouran, Dennis S.
Green, David J.
Hagen, Daniel R.
Harvey, Irene E.
Harwood, John T.
Hayek, Sabih I.
Hewitt, Julia C.
Holen, Dale A.
Hudnall, Amanda
Hufnagel, Pamela P.
Hunt, Brandon B.
Hurson, Ali R.
Jackson, Thomas N.
Jago, Deidre E.
Johnson, Ernest W.
Kazmerski, Victoria A.
Kenney, W. Larry
Kiefer, Daniel G.
Koul, Ravinder
Kunze, Donald E.
Landis, Melissa
Lesieutre, George A.
Manbeck, Harvey B.
Marshall, J. Daniel
Marsico, Salvatore A.
Mastrian, Kathleen G.
May, James E.
Mayer, Jeffrey S.
McGregor, Annette K.
Milakofsky, Louis
Minard, Robert D.
Moore, John W.
Myers, Jamie M.
Navin, Michael J.
Neimeister, Katherine A.
Nelson, Murry R.
Nichols, John S.
Ozment, Judy P.
Pangborn, Robert N.
Patterson, Henry O.
Pauley, Laura L.
Pearson, Katherine C.
Pell, Eva J.
Power, Barbara L.
Preston, Deborah
Rebane, P. Peter
Richards, David R.
Richards, Winston A.
Richman, Irwin
Ricketts, Robert D.
Ridley, Sheila E.
Rogers, Gary W.
Romano, John J.
Romberger, Andrew B.
Rowe, William A.
Sachs, Howard
Sandler, Karen Wiley
Sandmeyer, Louise E.
Scanlon, Dennis C.
Schengrund, Cara-Lynne
Serfass, Laura
Sharp, Jeffrey M.
Simmonds, Patience L.
Slobounov, Semyon
Smith, Carol A.
Smith, Stephen M.
Snavely, Loanne L.
Stace, Stephen W.
Steiner, Kim C.
Sternad, Dagmar
Stoffels, Shelley M.
Stratton, Valerie N.
Strikman, Mark
Su, Mila C.
Thomson, Joan S.
Tormey, Brian B.
Troester, Rodney L.
Troxell, D. Joshua
Turner, Tramble T.
Urenko, John B.
Varadan, Vasundara V.
Walters, Robert A.
Wanner, Adrian J.
Watkins, Marley W.
White, Eric R.
Willis, Daniel E.
Zhang, Jenny
OTHERS ATTENDING
FROM SENATE OFFICE
Bugyi, George J.
Hockenberry, Betsy S.
Price, Vickie R.
Simpson, Linda A.
Walk, Sherry F.
145 Total Elected
3
Total Ex Officio
7
Total Appointed
155 Total Attending
Curricular Affairs - Curriculum Report of March 13, 2001
Senate Council - Resolutions on Free Speech (Legislative)
Admissions, Records, Scheduling and Student Aid - Revision of Appendix C: Policies and Rules for Students Re: Foreign Language Admission Requirement (Legislative)
Faculty Benefits - Recommendations for Internal and External Reports to the Senate
on Faculty Salaries (Legislative)
Faculty Affairs -Recommendations on Policy Governing Copyright Clearance and Royalty Payments (Advisory/Consultative)
Faculty Affairs - Revision to Administrative Guidelines for HR-23: Promotion and Tenure Procedures and Regulations (Advisory/Consultative)
Faculty Benefits - Adoption Benefits (Advisory/Consultative)
Student Life - Code of Conduct and Disciplinary Procedures (Advisory/Consultative)
Committees and Rules Nominating Report for 2001-2002 - Faculty Rights and Responsibilities; Standing Joint Committee on Tenure; University Promotion and Tenure Review Committee (Informational)
Curricular Affairs - Status of Re-certification Process for General Education (Informational)
Elections Commission - Roster of Senators for 2001-2002 (Informational)
Faculty Affairs - Promotion and Tenure Summary for 1999-2000 (Informational)
Faculty Benefits - Penn State Travel Program (Informational)
Intercollegiate Athletics - Annual Report of Academic Eligibility and Athletic Scholarships for 2000-2001 (Informational)
Joint Committee on Insurance and Benefits - Annual Report – 1999-2000 (Informational)
Research - Graduate School Update – Annual Report, Eva Pell, Vice President of
Research/Dean of the Graduate School (Informational)
Senate Council Nominating Report for 2001-2002 - Senate Officers – Chair-Elect and Secretary - Faculty Advisory Committee to the President (Informational)
Senate Council - Commission for Women - 1981-2001: Status of Women at Penn State (Informational)