Announcements
- The new curriculum workflow in eLumen has two important changes that are relevant to us:
- The workflow no longer notifies every member of a department that a course is new or updated course have been launched. Anyone working to create or update a course needs to request department feedback. (I recommend that the Composition Coordinator — me, as of this writing — help coordinate this communication.)
- There is a workflow that is streamlined for DE changes only. If you’re updating the DE addendum on one or more of our courses, be sure you look for that. (That said, I sat through a curriculum committee meeting where courses with SLO and DE updates only nonetheless had to be sure that other information was correct, including rationales for textbooks over five years old.
- As I understand it, the Academic Senate has okayed Yuba joining the Online Education Consortium. There’s a lot of work involved, especially given the number of courses that the DE Committee is trying to validate (under pressure of the District demanding validation as a condition for stipends… grrr). But as things move along, we may find that some of our hard-to-fill classes will find students from outside our service area.
- Kiara sent an email to the department with a flyer announcing open submissions (deadline: March 15) for our online, student-edited literary journal, Flumes. I think Don Smith sent it out more widely, as well, so you may already have seen the flyer. If not, here’s a PDF of the email, and a copy of the flyer.
Report: ENGL 40B
Brian Jukes reported that he and I met with Jeremy and Carla (twice — and Don attended the first meeting) to discuss their unwillingness to schedule ENGL 40B, which is our second-semester tutor training course. It became clear that we were not going to get them to schedule the course, but we came to a compromise that will allow us to incorporate the training into their working hours. It’s not ideal, but it’s worth testing out.
Course Rotations
Now that we’ve added the Youth Lit and LGBTQ+ Lit courses to our roster, we need to update the course rotation schedule, which is used to ensure that students can expect courses they need for degrees will be offered regularly. We also discovered that we were offering some of our courses the same semester that Woodland offered the same courses.
The last bit of information I needed to build that schedule involved which two lit courses we would offer once every two years (rather than annually). We agreed that to put Youth Lit and Shakespeare in that category.
I will put a finalized version of that together soon and send it out for final approval.
Single-Point Rubrics
As I was investigating Dweck-influenced rubric headings, I came across something called a Single-Point Rubric. This was brand new to me, yet I also felt that someone in the department had introduced me to the concept already. Shades of Schrödinger.
Anyway, I talked about it incoherently for a few minutes, but promised I’d send out a couple links that introduce the idea. Et voilà:
- Cult of Pedagogy (one of Kyra’s favorite teacherly sites, it turns out) has a brief explanation of the single-point rubric.
- There’s a slightly more detailed look — 6 Reasons to Try a Single-Point Rubric — on the edutopia blog.
- A teacher from Estrella Mountain Community College piloted the single-point rubric in an online class, and ran into some challenges making it work for Canvas. She does have a handout, though, that shows how she adapted the Canvas rubric to do something similar (Word doc.). It’s not as good, in my view, but still better than the types of rubrics I’ve build in Canvas. [PS: If the link breaks, let me know. I’ve downloaded a copy.]
Let me know what you think!