Resources

Meeting Notes - Mar 3, 2016

Agenda

Legend:

  • Assignment: highlight indcates assignment
  • Recommendations: italics

Attendance:

  • Jeff Meadows, Marlo Steed, Ken Heidebrecht, Scott Powell, Len Sproule, Jane O’dea, Janice Rahn, Dawn McBride
  • regrets: David Hinger, Craig Lowen

Reports

Chair (Marlo):

  • NA

Scott (Tech support):

  • Updated to El Capitan (new operating system)
  • photocopier problmes
  • new Microsoft Office being installed over time
  • figuring out budgets

Jeff (Teaching Centre):

  • described the Agility initiative and noted that Tyler Heaton will be heading that up. Agility is putting on VR workshops, makerspace space ideas, cross disciplinary approach
  • etextbooks were discussed, publishers are going this way students will have ongoing access, automatically billed (no more line ups for textbooks,
  • research into classroom design is ongoing, the Teaching Centre plans to build small seminar rooms, (Jane noted that at one point in time we had those in place but those were scrapped for larger teaching spaces)

Ken:

  • it was indicated the latest souper was success, the timing was excellent and resulted in the event being well attended (coincided with PS II meeting)

Items for Action

LaptopLoaning Policy

Scott indicated that it was problematic having Faculty and students borrow laptops. It was a difficult to get them to return the items and some students tend to keep renewing their loan period for months. The issue of liability was discussed. At any given time 2-6 laptops are being borrlowed. The issue of maitenance of those borrowed items was also brought up - those needed to be rimages so that the build was fresh. Jeff suggested that we consider using the library to loan those out, it was noted that is what they do and they can deal with all the logistics of tracking those devices

Power Adapters & other peripherals

Scott noted that Faculty come to him for replacement power adpaters. The committe agreed taht this is excessive for the Faculty to pay for such things when it is the Faculty members responsibility to keep track of those items. It was suggested that Scott put together a policy statement, this will go the committee chair and then distribute it to the committee. Once it has been agreed upon it will be forwarded to the Dean with a recommendation.

TH 373 Renovation

Jane suggested that TH 373 needs to be looked at in terms of rec=novations. The projection screen is undersized for the capacity of the room. At the end of the meeting we took a field trip up to the room, Bernie Wirba joined us from the Teaching Centre and we brainstromed room ideas. One simple solution is to move the interactive whiteboard back to where it was originalling and put an 80 inch lcd screen in the centre of of the front wall. Tha would give two divces that could be mirrored so students would have the option of looking at either location. Another idea was to turn the room into a Scale up with 5 mirrored displays screens along the walls (no designated front of the room). Another idea was to use the current back wall as the front of the room and put a larger smartboard there. We also talked to Sharon about the disposition of the science cabinets and book shelves and there was some minor space that could be reclaied with removing a few of those items. Sharon indicated it would be nice to have some benches to simulate a lab and remove the carpet and put in rubber floor (building code for science labs).

Marlo will share these ideas with the dean.

Ed Tech Course Elective - Redesign.

Marlo described the frustration of working with the ed tech elective courses. He noted that in the current set of course there is considerable overlap. A couple of courses could probably be elminated. The other thought was that these become dated very quickly and at the same time,the list of approved courses constrain the options for instructors and students. It was noted that an idea came out of a recent meeting with the instructors of those courses. The idea is to do away with all the current courses and have one course that would allow students to pursue topic of their choosing. Jane and Janice both had conerns that were focused around rigor and students wanting to as little as possible. Marlo pointed out that those concerns are addressed now withine the current set of courses in the same kind of way that those would in this course. There were also concerns about losing explicit instruction of key core concepts. Marlo indicated that we do have Ed3508 which does some of that and is really the only mandatory part tech comonent of the program. Len suggested that there would be rigor and key elements would be address in the new course by making it competency based - (perhaps the wrong word but I think the sense was that it would meet clear expectations).

Marlo will take these concerns back to the instructor group.