Faculty Senate Meeting Minutes

March 5, 2008

Senate members present:  Ruth Frickle, Glen Avantaggio, Gloria Rose Koepping, Chris Gan, Shannon Proctor, Darryl Brice, Aaron Warnock, Jin Do, John Dunn, Michael Armstrong and Jeff Wagnitz.

Guests: Gwen Spencer

The meeting was called to order at 3:04 in room 411 of the Library.

The minutes from 2/6/08 were approved as amended.

Old Business

FACTC

Ruth reported on her attendance at the last FACTC meeting at Olympic College.  Their president discussed BSN salary issues and the gap in pay between 2 and 4 year schools.  The Student Achievement Initiative was also discussed as well as Legislative news.  Testing centers and the services they provide was also a topic of statewide interest.

Common Course Numbering

Jeff Wagnitz came to tell us that we have lost the fight on keeping common course numbering off our campus.  The five remaining schools that have not wanted to adopt common course numbering have been told by the State Board to get on board.  Jeff stated that we are disappointed in the outcome, but the reality is that we will be doing it.  Marie and Instruction Cabinet will be talking about how to implement this with the least amount of damage.

There are three levels of implementation we might be able to consider.  The first option is to see if we can just put italicized notation at the end of each course description that would state something like, “(corresponds to Engl 110).”  This is apparently what is done in California to comply with a similar concern.   The second option is to double list the course by writing, “This is the same as Engl 110.”  The third option is to rename and renumber the course.  The transcript would change to reflect the new name most likely with the 2^nd and third options only.  Gwen Spencer stressed that having the common course number on the transcript would be of great help to students who attend more than one school, as many students do in the pursuit of their degree.

This change will go into effect for Fall 2008 so it will be worked on and in place by early summer.

Jeff stressed that we still have the freedom to create new options or new classes.  There are only about 100 common courses that will require the new name and numbers and most of these are on the transfer side. 

Given that this will be occurring in rather quick order, there was discussion about revisiting our earlier motion from 2/7/07 asserting Faculty prerogative about course numbering and naming.  It was suggested that we might restate our prerogative over the curriculum, and state that we have reconsidered common course numbering, recognize it’s good for our students (due to having common courses and prerequisites easily viewed on the transcript for transfer students), and recommend it’s adoption.

We could say something like, “ In the best interest of students, having discussed the merits of common course numbering, we now recommend adopting this system.”    If we embrace this in a way that maintains our flexibility for curricular development in the future, that might be to our advantage.

Our next meeting is April 16^th, 2008.

Meeting adjourned at 3:54 p.m.

Minutes submitted by Gloria Rose Koepping, Faculty Senate Secretary