Author: gdkemble

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!

The Short Version

Here’s a list of the most important stuff that we discussed. If you want more information about any of the discussions, scroll down below and read the section on that issue.

• Please encourage students to use the Writing and Language Development Center (WLDC). Kiara sent an email (which I forwarded on Tuesday) with ideas for ways to do this.
• The English Department voted to pilot SLO reporting in eLumen. This will be very different from past semesters: instead of reporting collecting information to me through a Google Form, we’ll report SLOs for each individual student through eLumen.
• Adjustments to the Spring schedule have been completed, for the most part, though of course there is always that chance that courses may be cancelled for continued low enrollment.
• My recommendations for the Fall schedule were accepted, with a couple exceptions.
• Early in the semester, I’ll request feedback re: adding “Broadcast” to the DE addenda for ENGL 1E and 56.
• Woodland’s and our request to meet with the deans to discuss lowering composition course caps is on hold while the deans wait for the District to discuss policies around course caps more generally.
• As comp coordinator, I’ll be working on two main projects over this semester. If you have any insights or thoughts on any of these, please let me know:
  • Rotation for our literature classes
  • English Department Employee Handbook

I also have three issues I’ll be tracking. (I do not have a “longer version” for any of these because there isn’t anything to say yet.)

• Only 4 units of our 5-unit ENGL 1E are transferrable. I’m not sure what that means for our students at this point, so I need to follow up on that.
• We’re waiting to hear if our Academic Senate will vote to support Yuba College becoming part of the state’s Online Consortium.
• CSU has added a multicultural requirement (Area F). I don’t yet know how, if at all, that affects our Program Maps or our degrees.

If you have any questions about anything listed above, please read the longer version below. And if you still have questions, or if you have questions about anything not on the list, then please let me know.

The Longer Versions

WLDC

It would be helpful to really push our students to use the Writing and Language Development Center. Kiara sent an email (December 18, Subject: WLDC Reminders!), which I forwarded on Tuesday. Kiara also updated links and attached a flyer in a response to that message on Tuesday as well. (If you can’t find the email thread, let me know, and I’ll forward it to you.)

Aside from how students benefit from the WLDC, there are two important reasons to encourage students to use it:

First: Students are using NetTutor (or however it’s spelled) rather than the WLDC. (50% of our students’ NetTutor visits involved English tutoring.) This is true even though most of us have disabled NetTutor in our Canvas shells (if you haven’t, please do!) because students are going in through other courses and then submitting their English requests from there.

NetTutor provides far inferior tutoring services for English — much more grammar focused, less interactive, more “fixing” the paper rather than training students how to think about revision, and so on.

And second: the WLDC has been sort of under attack by some administrators, and if our students don’t use the center, it’s easier for administration to argue that it’s not as important as we know it is. This frustrates me, of course; looking at any numbers under pandemic conditions is a big problem, as I see it. But that’s where we are.

So please: encourage your students to use the WLDC. And (as I said) refer to Kiara’s email, which includes several specific ways that we can do this.

eLumen pilot for SLOs

eLumen is the program that is replacing TracDat (where we recorded Program Review and SLO assessment data) and CurricuNET (our curriculum software). Shawn asked that the English department pilot SLO reporting in eLumen, and the department agreed to do so (10 yes, 5 no-opinion, 2 no).

This means that all English faculty (full- and part-time) will report SLOs on each student, rather than (as we’ve done in the past) simply reporting the numbers of students who fell into each category. We’ll have more information as we move forward — Shawn and I have some work to do to develop an assessment rubric, and we’ll need to provide training. (It’s not hard, but it will be different, and will likely take a little more time.)

Related, but not identical: at an eLumen workshop, I learned that the integration between Canvas and eLumen is pretty limited. There is a way to set things up so that the assessment on a single assignment will automatically transfer SLO assessment scores into eLumen. But we, as a department, have some decisions to make, some of which might make that automation unhelpful.

More as we go.

Spring and Fall schedules

Don said that most, if not all, of the adjustments to the Spring schedule (specifically, cancelling classes and bumping to make sure full-timers have their contractually required load, or close to it) had been completed. This doesn’t mean that there will be no more changes — things might not go as predicted. But he is not expecting a “second round” of changes, just unexpected adjustments.

For the Fall, I was originally asked to created a normal schedule, but then the school decided it would put together a schedule that is roughly 50% live and 50% online. I adjusted by requesting a handful of hybrid courses (more on that in a moment) and shifting a handful of others online. The changes weren’t huge.

For hybrid courses, I created enough for the people who expressed explicit interest in exploring the mode. However, since some of those people are part-time faculty, and my ability to assign classes to them is contingent on seniority and return rights, there’s a possibility that a course or two may end up on the plate of someone who said they’d do it if they have to. I will know more later.

In most cases, the requests re: literature courses were accepted as recommended. The two exceptions: ENGL 40B (our follow-up tutor course) isn’t going to be allowed to run (though Brian J and I have requested a meeting to argue that this decision be reconsidered), and ENGL 34 was moved online (inexplicably, as far as I’m concerned, since it’s a late start class and thus gives maximum time for the vaccines to have an effect, etc.)

ENGL 1E and 56 DE Addenda

We decided that ENGL 1E and 56 should not be offered online except in emergencies, and we made sure our DE addenda reflected that. However, “except in emergencies” relies on the state declaring an emergency, which means we have no flexibility to move 1E or 56 online if the campus closes. And that’s a problem for students who need (or want) those courses.

So I am going to recommend that we revise the DE Addenda for these two classes to allow “Broadcast” as a modality. This would mean we would be allowed to offer the course online, but only synchronously — that is, the instructor would teach it over Zoom, but at the same times that it was scheduled for face-to-face.

The idea is always to schedule the course face-to-face, but to have the option to shift it to broadcast if that becomes necessary. The alternative, unless the state announces that we’re in what they consider an emergency, is to cancel the course. (Or, as is the case this semester, not to offer it at all.)

I’ll run a poll/survey sometime once the semester has settled in a bit.

Class Size Discussion

Last semester, Brian Jukes and I met with Aree Metz and Kevin Ferns from Woodland to develop a request and rationale for lowering class sizes in composition courses. We sent the two relevant deans a request to schedule a meeting, but were told that the VPs and the District are working to develop a process for reviewing course sizes, and the deans would like clarity from that discussion before they meet with us.

I (and I’m sure I’m not alone on this) am not content to just sit around waiting, but that was at the very end of the last semester, and we haven’t yet discussed what our next steps will be. I’ll let everyone know when we’ve decided on our next steps.

My projects for the semester

In addition to things mentioned above, I plan to work on a couple projects this semester.

First, early in the semester, I would like us to finalize a course rotation plan for our lit courses. We now have more lit courses than we have slots for a two-year rotation, and we’ve run into a couple semesters where our rotation conflicted with Woodland’s. I’ll develop a draft and get feedback within the first few weeks of school.

Second, I hope to begin putting together a sort-of “Employee Handbook” for English, as a resource for all of us, but especially for new faculty. I’ll likely build it in an English Dept. Canvas shell, which could also serve as a place to discuss issues asynchronously and/or share resources. (We’ve wanted that for a long time, and even started dumping things in a shell, but it’s kind of disorganized.)

If you have anything that you wish you knew or had known — policies, answers to questions, etc., either now or back when you were still new at the college — let me know so I can include it in the handbook.