Faculty Senate: November 17, 2009
The topics at this week’s Senate meeting had some overlap with Deans & Chairs this week, so I’ll just cover what was new.
Distance education – John spoke about the drive for SCH productivity and distance education, based on our upcoming transition to RCM. The big point is that under RCM, we’ll be rewarded for SCH production (which we’re already pretty good at, but we could be better, according to John) and entrepreneurial activities. Undergraduate courses and graduate degree programs are the big focus, so expect these topics to keep coming up in College meetings and planning sessions. Questions raised included intellectual property concerns (right now all online courses created by UF faculty become the property of UF), quality concerns, etc. John floated the idea of having some kind of roundtable in the college where folks could get their questions answered and the Senate was enthusiastic.
Accreditation standards – Linda presented the new ACEJMC accreditation standards to the Senate and gave us all copies of the booklet. She also provided us with a link to the electronic version for blog readers.
Journalism curriculum review – Ted and Renee came to present Journalism’s revised curriculum and get feedback. Most of the questions concentrated on the equipment requirement, especially affordability, connectivity, and similar issues. Mike M. suggested the proposal go to the Technology Committee for input. Jon raised an important question about MMC 2100 and how changes to the course would impact Advertising students. See the official minutes for our vote of support and a friendly amendment from Jon regarding MMC 2100.
Senate blog – We discussed this blog (if you’re reading this, then we decided to launch!) and how to ensure its usefulness to the faculty. We decided only Senators would post, but that we would try to cover as much of what’s happening in the College as possible. We also agreed that a statement of policies would be helpful, so I’ll work on that this week and post a new page under Pages (where About is) soon.
As always, this blog is intended for information purposes only. It does not replace official minutes. If you see an error here, please let the author of the post or another Senator know immediately and we’ll correct it. Thanks for reading!