The afternoon meeting was on Student registration. I made sure that I made it because I believed it would cover adding closed classes and dropping students. However by the end we realized that this process should not be included in this BPA. We set an objective of "To enable student to attend classes and enable collection of FTES to enable billing process, and to create rosters" but by the end we realized that our flow chart was getting too messy and ... I will admit that my blood sugar was low and I did not pay attention. By the end everyone was exhausted and were talking of going to Camachos for a drinks.
At the beginning before giving up (and lowering our objective) we were trying to identify the actors involved in the process. We came up with Students, A&R, Faculty, and Virtual College. The Virtual college was identified as an actor because the rosters will be loaded into Web CT or Blackboard. As we tried to explain what is the virtual college and the type of classes offered on campus, we realized that there is a need for policy regarding Web enhanced classes. Do we require web enhanced courses to be behind Web CT? Another question that came up was "when are we switching to Blackboard?" This is a question that even I (as a member of Virtual college committee) could not answer.
Finaly, the trainer had a great personality and I watched him disarm some hostile participants by making them feel included and important to the process. Again today was a productive day and I did not mind that I woke up at 5 AM on a Tuesday to get here by 8 AM! The only criticism of the meeting was that some of us did not belong there. If I had not enjoyed the flow charts I would have been angry that I went to writing a BPA in which I did not have a role. Today's BPAs mainly concerned A&R, and IT. Again overall I enjoyed the day. Maybe it was all of those flow charts that got the economist in me excited!
Why can't this darn blog remember passwords? Posted by Michelle.
ReplyDeleteWe don't have a "policy" regarding web-enhanced classes as their nature can vary quite widely. Someone COULD web-enhance a course by merely directing students to their own website - or they might use something other than whatever CMS the college is employing. The process has been that faculty who wish to have students in the CMS merely make a request of the Virtual College to do this. If/when we have things seamless, it would be ideal to upload all classes into the CMS with a generic message up that indicates that the faculty member may or may not be using the course shell. Students can then actually see what classes they are in by logging into the CMS - which might be preferrable to however admissions is doing thing. This, of course, only works if a student is automatically removed from the CMS when a course is dropped. I have seen things work this way at other schools, and it works quite nicely - and encourages both faculty and students to be regular users of the CMS. And if you have a robust CMS that actually announces to students when there are new messages and such, all the better. By the way - we do have a Division Policy with respect to online classes - one that has not been followed and really needs to be followed to ensure the quality of OUR offerings.