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Archive for June 12th, 2012

12
Jun

FEP: Self Assessment of Asst. Department Chair Responsibilities

In addition to an assessment of the “3 REQUIRED AREAS” (RFP Section 3.5.3.1.) , “AT LEAST TWO ELECTED AREAS” (RFP Section 3.5.3.2.), and other “RELATED AREAS” (REP Section 3.5.3.3.)  may also be selected by the faculty member to review, in order to bring into better focus their full professional involvements at the college or within the District.  Examples include program coordination, research projects, department/division chair responsibilities, student activities-advising/mentoring, professional involvement in the community, professional growth, involvement/projects, professional interaction with colleagues, etc.

In this post I will focus on department/division chair responsibilities. First, I am not a department chair, nor do I ever want to be one. I’m thankful to have a great chair to work under, and somehow I ended up being an assistant chair along the way. In my roll as the eCourses coordinator for the English department, I started out being in charge of further developing the online program in our department. I watch enrollments and makes suggestions for adding additional online courses if all of sections fill up. In order to do this, we have to qualified adjuncts available and ready. I help faculty get trained and to develop both online and hybrid courses. I’m also responsible for mentoring and evaluating new online faculty. This past semester we decided to open it up a bit and get more adjuncts trained in teaching online. I’ve been working with 8 adjuncts and several full-time faculty on developing new online and hybrid classes. Our growth has been tremendous.

English Department eCourses Growth Over the Last 3 years. Fall 2009 – Total of 12 online courses – Don’t have the break down.

This Spring 2012 – 38 total online courses in the department

Writing Courses

  • 2 CRW170/CRW270 (Creative Writing)
  • 4 Developmental Ed Modules (1 credit each)
  • 8 ENG101 (Freshman Comp I)
    • 1 – 8 week
    • 1 – 12 week late start
  • 12 ENG102 (Freshman Comp II
    • 1 – 8 week
    • 1 – 12 week late start
  • 1 ENG111 (Technical Writing)
  • 2 ESL

ENH: English Humanities/Literature Courses

  • 2 ENH110 ( Intro to Lit)
  • 1 ENH242 (American Lit)
  • 1 ENH285 (Contemporary Women Writers)
  • 3 ENH291 (Children’s Lit)
  • 1 ENH295 (Banned Books)
  • 1 ENH235 (Gothic Lit)

Considering that we offer around 440 sections each semester this is roughly 8%. We’re at 10% with our hybrid courses added in.

We’ve added 5 more online ENG101 for this fall and 5 more ENG102’s for Spring 2013, although we’re starting to see a drop off in enrollment, so our growth might be slowed moving forward. However, if we need to continue to grow, we now have adjuncts trained and ready to teach new online courses.

As eCourses Coordinator I’m now responsible for book orders for all online courses, so I’ve done that for that last two semesters. I’ve been meeting on my own time this summer to work with faculty who are finishing up course development on classes they will teach this fall. And I’ve scheduled for technology training for our text book online supplement – Connect Composition 2.0. We had a session last week with 15 people in attendance. We have another training scheduled for July.