FEP 2018: Self Examination of Committee Participation
To complete an FEP each faculty member must engage in a self-examination of “THREE REQUIRED AREAS”:
- GOVERNANCE AND/OR COMMITTEE PARTICIPATION AT THE COLLEGE AND/OR DISTRICT LEVELS
I was just chatting recently with our interim Dean of Instruction about a new process for committee selection for faculty. Apparently it’s not just a pain in the butt for faculty, but also for the deans in trying to insure all faculty get their requested committee picks. Well, I can verify that for two years in a row (2015-16 & 2016-17) I didn’t get any of the committees I requested. The second year it happened to me, I was seriously pissed off upset. My solution was to not participate on those randomly assigned committees and instead serve where I thought I could best serve the college. To be honest, I don’t think anyone even noticed. No one came knocking. Instead I chaired or co-chaired four different committees over the last three years and participated in several more.
This academic year on campus I serve on the Technology Alliance Committee, the CTLE Advisory Committee, GCC OER Committee, Learning Communities Committee (LCAC), PAR Committee, and the President’s Completion Task Force. I’m happy to report that two of those I actually requested and received as my assignment. I also serve on a district committee for OER, Maricopa Millions, Faculty Developers Committee, and the unofficial CTL Faculty Directors Committee. That’s 9 committee assignments. I’d complain but Meghan has more than I do, so it seems pointless to complain.
So where do I start? I’ll focus on OER. After five years of being involved with OER, I have plenty to share about my committee participation. As chair of the GCC OER Committee, in our first year as a committee, we participated in a district wide OER Student Awareness Campaign. Our 5 person committee did the following last fall.
GCC participated in the Student OER Awareness Campaign planned by the Maricopa Millions Steering team the week of September 25th. Our OER Committee organized events at both North and Main on Tuesday and Wednesday of that week. Faculty and volunteer students used laptops/tablets to showcase Maricopa Millions OER Student website and to show students how to find OER courses in “Find a Class” with the No Cost/Low Cost filter. Additionally, on the main campus, we used a camera and whiteboard for the “How Much Did You Pay?” student pictures, which were posted to social media with hashtags #OER, #textbookbroke, #maricopamillions and @MaricopaOER. At North two faculty were able to talk one on one with about 110 students, and on Main, a crew of two faculty and 6 students took 20 photos, and spoke with well over 150 students. Our photos and talent release forms can be found in this drive folder. Our social media can be found on this page.
In addition to my on campus OER participation, I continue to co-chair the district OER committee, Maricopa Millions. Lisa and I were a little overwhelmed with some new responsibilities with the new OER fee, so we added a third chair, Angela Christiano (PV Math). We spent what seemed like endless hours working on the OER Enhancement Fee RFP, and then after it was approved, we had to deal with vendors calling us and trying to sell us on their products.
The following is a list of some of the many to-do items we covered over the last year. Lisa and I presented on MM at NISOD last May in Austin. We wrote a proposal and was accepted to present at Educause in October, but declined the invitation. The team planned another successful OER Dialogue Day this spring and had about 80 participants. We completed another call for proposals (Phase 8) for MM grants and provided support for existing Maricopa Millions grantees. And we planned a successful Maricopa Millions $10M celebration that was held at Gateway last fall.
In addition to all that, we supported a new Maricopa Remix project to increase adoption, maintained the OER Canvas site, helped create a Canvas Commons Implementation Plan, worked with business offices to create materials on how to enter OER Enhancement fee into FMS, SIS and coordinate census dates for reporting to vendors, and developed a plan to institutionalize OER in the district. The plan was to appoint a faculty in residence to coordinate OER efforts, chair OER Steering Team, etc.; provide budget for outreach, professional development, incentivizing OER, and coordinating OER Degree. This plan was adopted this spring, and we are in our last semester as tri-chairs.
I’m really excited to be at the end of a great ride with OER in Maricopa. It has been a rewarding experience to work with some wonderful colleagues, Lisa, Angela and now Matthew, as well as all the other OER champions on the steering team. I don’t think I can find another opportunity as grand as this, although I am looking forward to a time when I won’t be in the middle of so much action.
FEP 2018: Self-Examination of Three Required Areas & Two Elected Areas
It’s FEP time again. Every 3 years and 2017-2018 is my turn again. For my FEP this year, once again I chose to use a portfolio as means of assessment for each of the “REQUIRED,” “ELECTIVE,” and “RELATED” areas that are evaluated. My professional blog: Freshmancomp.com serves as my portfolio and links to all the relevant parts listed below in the FEP description. This post will be updated to link to each part of my FEP listed below.
To complete an FEP each faculty member must engage in a self-examination of “THREE REQUIRED AREAS”:
- TEACHING (OR OTHER PRIMARY DUTIES). For example, instructional or service delivery, content expertise, classroom or program management, instruction/program design. This year as faculty director of the CTLE, I decided to focus on service delivery.
- COURSE OR PROGRAM DEVELOPMENT/REVISION. For example, a review of syllabi, tests, and course or program content, including competencies and objectives. I decided to redesign my hybrid ENG102 course.
- GOVERNANCE AND/OR COMMITTEE PARTICIPATION AT THE COLLEGE AND/OR DISTRICT LEVELS. I serve on the Technology Alliance Committee, the CTLE Advisory Committee, OER Committee, Learning Communities Committee, and the President’s Completion Task Force on campus. I serve on a district committee for OER, Maricopa Millions, Faculty Developers Committee, and the unofficial CTL Faculty Directors Committee.
In addition to an assessment of these “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.
- AT LEAST TWO ELECTED AREAS:
- Professional Development &
- Research Project – MCLI Grant
- RELATED AREAS:
- Involvement/Projects – Maricopa Millions
As a means of designing an FEP that is flexible enough to respect the broad diversity of the faculty role, a faculty member developing and implementing the plan should select ways of examining his/her performance that will most effectively describe his/her: current performance, future goals and actions needed to achieve them, accomplishments in the professional areas to be examined, etc. These may include different means of assessment for each of the“REQUIRED,” “ELECTIVE,” and “RELATED” areas that are evaluated. Examples of different means include checklists, observations, student evaluation instruments (which can be customized), student skill inventories, video assessments, portfolios, written summaries, conferences, etc.
What’s the Hardest Part About Teaching Students Research?
Grading the final paper? Ha! Just kidding.
Although grading those research papers has been a painful experience in the past, I’ve been on a mission to improve the process for both myself and my students, and lately things have been a lot better. So I’d say the hardest part about teaching students research is getting them to understand what synthesis means and how to do it properly. Research papers for most students means taking pieces of content from others and piecemealing together what they want their paper to say. This type of paper is painful to read and grade. I figured if I could get them to understand how to synthesize to support their own voice, I could probably get some decent papers. So this is what I did.
First, I stopped spending so much time on teaching APA format and asking students to spend time reading text about HOW to do research. My new approach is we are just going to do it. A little at a time. I started by creating a list of lessons to help teach students about research and the research process. These lessons are created using tools like Softchalk and Storyline 360. These tools allow for me to talk to students about these concepts, show examples and then ask quick questions about their understanding. It’s much more engaging. The way these lessons are integrated into the course, it makes students feel as if it’s just another opportunity to hear from the instructor about another piece of the process. A quick snapshot of some of the lessons are displayed here to the right.
The next step was to adopt a technology tool to help students learn APA documentation style without it being a hindrance to the process as a whole. The tool I chose was NoodleTools. I learned about it from one of our awesome librarians, Pamela Gautier, and it’s a tool created by librarians. I needed a tool that was not just a citation generator. I wanted something that could be used to teach students and to help students through the whole research process, thus allowing me to spend more time on teaching synthesis and analysis of sources instead of how to manage a research project.
NoodleTools is an online platform designed to be a one-stop support system for students’ research. It includes a thesis writing feature, research planner / due date reminder, notecard generator, development space (collaborating with GoogleDocs) and, of course, a citation generator.
One of my first assignments for students is to teach them about creating an annotated bibliography to keep track of their sources during the research process. NoodleTools has a lot of resources for students and faculty to help teach many concepts as well as how to use the tool. My focus is more on the purpose for keeping an annotated bibliography and how the annotations are written. NoodleTools helps instruct students on the process and format. For instance, NoodleTools will show students a list of possible source types to choose from (see image). Depending on the citation type selected, a Show Me tutorial may be available to help students evaluate the source. The lessons are differentiated based on which level the student is in: Starter, Junior, or Advanced.
Once students start to fill in the citation form with information about their source, the form provides further support with pop up dialogue boxes. So when a student puts the cursor in the Article Title form field, a pop-up with the follow message appears: “Article title: Capitalize sentence-style (only the first letter of the first word in the title and in the subtitle (if any), as well as the first letter of any proper nouns).” For students learning APA, this is a big change from MLA, which they learned in ENG101. So it doesn’t just format the citation for students. They are learning as they use the tool. After I’ve taught student how to write annotations for the sources, they come back to NoodleTools to add them to each citation, which again is a very easy process for students.
I could set up a dropbox (Inbox) in NoodleTools for students to submit their projects for me to grade in NoodleTools; however, for the annotated bibliography I want for student to see how it is formatted. So I instruct students to Print/Export to Word or Google Docs, and their annotated bibliographies are formatted beautifully. I almost wanted to cry when I got 90% correctly formatted assignments. I was able to spend most of my time grading the content and very little correcting APA formatting mistakes. Students felt less stressed about it too. Here’s an example of what the annotated bibliography looks like exported directly out of NoodleTools. Not perfect, but a good start.
Now for the good stuff. Remember the good old days of physical notecards. We color coded them, stacked them in piles, wrote all over them. Organized them in ways to help write the paper. It was glorious. But I stopped requiring physical notecards for my students 10 years ago when I started teaching online. For obvious reasons, but I truly feel as if it affected my students’ ability to synthesize. I was desperate for a solution, and NoodleTools did the job. In the image to the right you can see some digital notecards that can be color coded and tagged and moved around the virtual desktop. This is really cool, but the best part is teaching students how to create good notecards.
NoodleTools helps immensely with this process. In class we learn basic note taking skills using summary, paraphrase and quotes. Why and how. We also practice annotating sources using Hypothes.is. After they have that down, we learn to make notecards. The process makes it impossible for students to not cite their sources correctly. Well, nearly impossible. Once they click the New Notecard button, a dialogue box appears (see below) that guides students through the process of taking a note. It prompts them to choose a source for the note, and there is a drop down menu of all of their sources (4).
They title the notecard to help with organization, and in box 5 on the left they add in a direct quotation. I can edit the instructions that pop up in each box. For instance, I’ve added to my assignment that students should wrap that direct quote in quotation marks. On the right side is where they put in their paraphrase or summary using their own words. I have students do both so they can choose which to use in the paper later. Lastly they add their own ideas, original thinking in the bottom of box 5. Again I’ve edited the instructions to meet the needs for the assignment.
The next step in the process is to create an outline for the research paper and then have students add notecards to the outline. This helps students organize the notes they plan to include in the paper. It also helps them to visualize how synthesis works. They are adding notes to help support their own arguments, and not just adding notes to make up the paper. So it helps to get students to start with a good outline. We start small with a template (see below) and then fill it in with complete sentences as we continue the process. Students can drag the notecards from the left and drop them right into the outline on the right.
Overall NoodleTools has been a great tool to help teach students the research process, and it’s also been easy for me to keep up with the grading, as students can submit their research projects in a NoodleTools Inbox that I can set up, or they can easily download to Google Drive or Microsoft Word and submit in Canvas. It’s definitely worth checking out.
