Faculty Senate met February 9th and 23rd. At the February 9th meeting, guests Nicholas Ambrose (Testing Services) & Julie Thyssen provided a thorough update of SOS administration for Fall semester ending with the January Interim. They thanked folks for using the dedicated SOS email to communicate issues, identified the technical challenges that we have experienced and discussed how these challenges are being addressed. Julie Thyssen provided a visual overview of the instructor dashboard and a dashboard for department and college level data. Our guests answered questions and collected feedback from Senators. Testing Services is working with the Faculty Senate’s Improvement of Instruction Committee to create a process to add departmental level questions to the survey. In addition to passing a number of APC items and program bylaws revisions, Senators discussed their response to the Provost’s Instructional Academic Staff Working Group ‘immediate action’ recommendation specifically regarding voting rights and composition of the faculty senate.

At the February 23 meeting, Senators had an update from Athletics Director Darryl Sims, who responded to questions about student health and wellbeing. We had informative presentation and back and forth discussion with Caroline Geary, COLS Associate Dean for the Access Campuses and Ken Price, Director of the USP about pending modifications to the associates degree. Provost John Koker provided a update on (1) Academic Planning Program Planning; (2) Fall 2021 teaching modalities; and (3) Teaching Loads. Senators engaged with Provost on each of these issues to provide feedback.  For the Fall 2021, emphasis is placed on in-person modalities with some dedicated online offerings (thus moving away from the hyflex approach). It is understood there will be greater clarity about recommendations for social distancing and mask wearing masks as we move forward. Provost is working with the Faculty Senate Executive committee and Deans of the Colleges to help him form a working group to explore models for faculty workload.  The outcome generated by this group will be the first step in developing and implementing a University policy that would allow faculty to assign a portion of the 24-credit teaching load to other areas (such as increased research, creative activity or service).  The earliest implementation at this point would be Fall of 2022. To meet that timeline, we would need a policy in place before scheduling for fall semester begins.