danaleeling

Tuesday I used a half an hour gap between the college strategic planning summit and class to gather a number of plants for use in the introduction to ethnobotany. I pulled together Hibiscus tiliceus, Macaranga carolinensis, Cordyline fruticosa, Artocarpus altilis, Volkameria inermis, Piper ponapense, Premna obtusifolia, Scaevola taccada, Senna alata, Davallia solida, Davallia pectinata, Thelypteris maemonensis, Decalobanthus peltatus, Lycopodiella cernua, Microsorum scolopendria, Morinda citrifolia, Falcataria falcata, Stachytarpheta jamaicensis, Dicranopteris linearis, Centella asiatica, and Eugenia uniflora. The students were, by and large, unable to name any of the plants except breadfruit. Two students evinced some knowledge of a few plants. The collapse in knowledge is real. At the summit FSM DOE called for the inclusion of indigenous cultural knowledge into the curriculum. Out in the trenches the battle is being lost  But the ethnobotany class will not go down wit...

Workload is a complex and nuanced topic. A survey sought to provide feedback on instructional workloads at the college.  Comments as summarized by ChatGPT 4.0 mini The document discusses the ideal and reasonable teaching load in terms of contact hours for faculty members. Key points include: 12 Contact Hours: Generally considered an ideal and regular teaching load. 15 Contact Hours: Reasonable but potentially demanding, depending on the nature of courses and additional responsibilities. It may be manageable with adequate support and familiarity with teaching tools like Canvas. Workload Considerations: The current system’s definition of a full load (12-15 hours) is unclear and unfair. New faculty should start with 12-15 hours, preferably with fewer course preparations. Overload should be compensated, especially given the low pay and additional duties like committee work and advising. Course Variability: Teaching load can vary significantly across disciplines and course formats. Mult...

The second day of faculty development workshops at the national campus began with program assessment summaries. That afternoon the workshop considered the assessment data and worked on planning and reflection. On Wednesday morning the workshop looked at the suggested program schedule in the catalog. The workshop evaluation asked faculty to respond to prompts by agreeing or disagreeing with the prompt. The responses were converted to numeric values: Strongly disagree Disagree Neutral Agree Strongly agree With 18 responses recorded, averages were calculated for each prompt by session. The overall average was 4.35. In general faculty agreed or strongly agreed with the prompts. Differences in the means between prompts were not large.   In the Tuesday morning session, the last prompt on the evaluation was the lowest rating for any of the prompts across both days. This was a result of the prompt being the only prompt to receive multiple responses of neutral. 17% of the responses wer...

This article is really just a set of breadcrumbs for future reference to documents related to discussions I happened to have today in a workshop. Everything in this article is solely my own opinion at this point. This is really a waypoint on a journey that began in 1998 and which evolved into a vision in 2006 for aggregating learning outcome performance. In 2006 the software to make that vision a reality was not known to me. Roughly six years later Nuventive TracDat would provide a way to potentially implement the vision of 2006. The journey of aligning the outcomes stack, which was misaligned even in 2006, continues.  The general education program assessment plan is to continue to report course student learning outcome results in Nuventive and to aggregate those results in Nuventive to report on achievement of all general education program learning outcomes. A guiding principle is that the general education program learning outcomes are the only outcomes each and every student ...

Faculty development day began with departmental informational updates from the office of the president, enrollment management and student services, institutional effectiveness and quality assurance, cooperative research and extension, and administration.  The workshop evaluation asked faculty to respond to prompts by agreeing or disagreeing with the prompt. The responses were converted to numeric values: Strongly disagree Disagree Neutral Agree Strongly agree With 52 responses recorded, averages were calculated for each prompt. With all of the averages above four, faculty generally agreed or strongly agreed with the prompt. The strongest agreement was that the morning presentations were informative. The first presentation after lunch was on updates in the Instructure Canvas learning management system. Faculty expressed strong agreement with the prompts for the Canvas updates session. This might be expected as Canvas is what faculty interact with on a daily basis and which has the ...

Summer 2024 student evaluations featured a new ratings response order Student evaluations of instructor, course, and course materials provide guidance for the institutions on areas of relative strengths and areas where there may be room for improvement. Bearing in mind that old data is not usefully actionable data, the intent of this report is to convey broad themes emerging in the evaluations to decision makers as rapidly as possible.  This report presumes familiarity with the student evaluations form in use at the institution. The responses were converted to numeric values: Strongly disagree Disagree Neutral Agree Strongly agree As a preface, results this term are not directly comparable to prior terms. Data from the past five terms showed that a significant number of students mark the same response to all of the prompts. These students are marking all fives, or all fours, and in some instances, all ones, in response to every rating prompt. These are termed "straights" in t...