Academic Affairs Cluster

ACADEMIC AFFAIRS COMMITTEE OF CPC

 

M I N U T E S

March 5, 2008

2:30 p.m.

President’s Conference Room

 

ATTENDANCE

 

PRESENT

Administration

Dr. David Humphreys, Bobby McNeel, Dr. Robert Richards, Luis Rosas

Faculty

Nabeel Barakat, Sally Fasteau, Joy Fisher, Evelyn Lum, Lauren McKenzie, Joyce Parker, Dr. Stan Sandell, Beverly Shue, June Smith, Mark Wood, Bradley Young

Students

Liz Anceno, Eileen Luke, Omar Patel, Hinna Parwaiz, Felipe Sebastian, Rachael Richards, Julian Wan

 

CALL TO ORDER

Luis Rosas called the meeting to order at 2:30 p.m. in the President’s Conference Room.

 

 

I. ADOPTION OF AGENDA

The agenda was accepted as presented.

 

II. ADOPTION OF MINUTES

The minutes for the meeting of February 20, 2008 was accepted as presented.

 

 

III. PROGRAM REVIEW IMPLEMENTATION PROCEDURE

For the benefit of the new student senators, Mr. Rosas explained that this meeting is really a standing committee of the College Planning Council and that what is done here focuses on the planning of our academic programs. All of the discussion today will relate to how we come about forming our unit plans to do the things that a college has to do to be in compliance with our accreditation guidelines. Dr. Humphreys was asked to review the program review process at Harbor College. In any organization you have a hierarchy of relationships in that organization and planning can usually occur in one of two directions. It can either be done primarily at the top, as a centralized plan sent down, or it can occur from the bottom levels and filter its way up through that pyramid to the top. Our assumption here is that we begin with some of the issues at the bottom of that hierarchy and say what is going on in the microcosm and then plan up to the higher levels.

 

What we are trying to do is take a look at what is happening with student learning outcomes. What we are trying to do is set up a real process by which we understand on a course by course basis or program by program basis and, again at the institutional levels, what outcomes our students are achieving in the classes and based on that, let’s plan on what the institution should be doing and where it is going to go so that we are now starting to provide data about these student learning outcomes. This is a rigorous process through which we are undertaking to identify what it is that is valuable. We assess what we value. The faculty needs to identify what it is that we want to assess. What’s important to us? We say that it is important that students know how to write a five paragraph essay that has a beginning, middle and end, it has paragraph development, it has some substance. If that is what is important to us, how do we know that they can do that? We want to be able to assess that and so this now becomes the Student Learning Outcome assessment cycle. We are going to cycle through every semester taking a look at what students really learned. This is then going to feed into two other documents that are very important to us—one is program review and the other is the unit plan. This is a long look. This is both retrospective and prospective. It looks backward as well as forward and we do it every six years.

 

Program review is accomplished at the discipline level. Disciplines study all of the information they have available to them about the programs—who our students are, what they need and what they are learning and then assess it. We then make a six year plan. How do we get to where we want to be? Each year we do a unit plan based on what we said we were going to do in six years based on each year’s investigation of what the students have learned. So now this unit plan drives what we’re doing. How do we spend our resources? What do we buy? What do we add? This now becomes the way in which we look at each year within the academic departments supervised by Mr. Rosas and represented on this committee. There is also the cluster for the President’s area, one for Administrative Services and one for Student Services, each of the latter co-chaired by those vice-presidents. Each one of these clusters has a cluster plan each year derived from the unit plans of the units within it that in turn determines the college plan prioritizing all of the major directions for the college.

 

Reviews due this semester

Members discussed the Program Review Schedule. Mr. Rosas noted that the dates that were on there before were updated by two years. For the programs that were due in 2007, Mr. Rosas recommended that, with the agreement of the Senate and the Division Council, limitations could be imposed as far as requesting positions. This is something that we have done before. In order to go to the FHPC, Chairs need to have an up-to-date unit plan. Dr. Spink requested that the Program Review Schedule be set up by program review year as well as alphabetically.

 

Lauren McKenzie will take the Chancellor’s list of courses in the District, identify which ones are currently active and then send it out to the division chairs and ask them for any further information about those that they wish to archive, those that they wish to drop out of the catalog and that will give us a list of what we can then compare with what we have and what we don’t have. Dr. Humphreys stated that we need to have a correlation between what is in the catalog and what we are offering and what we have for course outlines. Otherwise, we create a real morass for people who are trying to do work like Brenda Guertin who need to be able to talk to CSUDH when they want to do articulation agreements. Every course that is in the schedule of classes that is being currently offered should have an updated course outline, with SLO’s imbedded, on file in the Office of Academic Affairs and it should be available on line as well.

 

Assessment concerns

Dr. Humphreys explained that for those who were in the prior meeting of Division Council, for the six year plan, it is another spot where it picks up the assessment of SLO’s and what you have learned from them because it provides a space that says what are you going to do based on your SLO’s. It gives this further connection between the assessment of SLO’s and your planning and budgeting process so that when they take a look at this in 2012, they are going to be able to follow, very clearly, a line that goes from the report forms that you will generate about your SLO’s into program review and into the unit planning process. In both forms there will be a column that asks you to identify the measures and what you have done about it. How are you are using the data in the planning process? It becomes very important to our accreditation.

 

Process overview samples

Jim Stanbery had made four or five samples of program review overviews from different colleges available for reference at this meeting, in case Harbor College might want to prepare a similar document for our process. It was decided that these would be reviewed in a smaller sub-committee.

 

 

IV. ITEMS FROM THE FLOOR

Mr. Rosas asked Dr. Spink on behalf of the students, when can we start taking classes in the new buildings? Dr. Spink stated that in the last Student Senate meeting, she did go over with the students the buildings and the timeline of where the college is and she didn’t think we would be able to schedule classes in the Northeast Academic building for the start of the fall semester, although we will probably make it into the new Technology building by fall. She also reminded both staff and students that the Fall Schedule of Classes will be printed with the old room assignments, and students going to the old room if the new building is ready will be met by the instructor and walked to the new building. The same will apply in the case of new buildings ready in mid-semester.

 

The students also observed that they would like to see a greater variety of campus food offerings on a more consistent basis within a student’s budget.

 

The Chancellor will be visiting the campus on Tuesday, March 11, for an open forum. Along with him will be the new Vice Chancellor of Economic Development, Marvin Martinez; John Clerx, Associate Vice Chancellor of Instructional & Student Support Services; Gary Columbo, Vice Chancellor of Institutional Effectiveness; and David Beaulieu, President of the District Academic Senate.

 

V. ADJOURNMENT

The meeting adjourned at 3:25 p.m.