By SHANNON O. WELLS
Senate Council President Kris Kanthak kicked off her report to Faculty Assembly at its Feb. 18 meeting in Posvar Hall with a nod to the long thaw out from the extended deep freeze the greater Pittsburgh region endured earlier in the month along with acknowledgement of Lent season.
“Thanks for joining us as we continue this much-needed thaw in Pittsburgh,” she said. “For me, winter always loses its charm on Dec. 26, but this is the first week where it makes sense to start thinking about the brighter, warmer future that is coming up.”
The Faculty Assembly meeting fell on Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, which, she noted, “spans from today until Holy Thursday.
“For those who celebrate, Lent is a time for spiritual reflection and anticipation of Easter. For others in our community, this week is noteworthy because it marks the start of spring training in earnest. For those who celebrate, spring training prepares players and fans for the upcoming baseball season,” she said, noting the Pittsburgh Pirates’ home opener at PNC Park on April 3 against the Baltimore Orioles.
In other, Pitt-related news, Kathak said she’s working with a representative from the Office of the Provost and the Educational Policies Committee to create an ad hoc committee focused on the best ways to include shared governance in approving and assessing curricular decisions related to changes in the undergraduate General Education requirements.
The new requirements will “simplify the process for undergraduate students who wish to switch to another school within the University or pursue a course of study that traverses one or more schools,” she said. “I'm glad that the provost and his team are thinking at the start about how best to include faculty voices via shared governance in this important process.”
More will be shared about the ad hoc committee at the next Faculty Assembly meeting, she noted.
Kanthak praised Senate committees for “continuing their hard work,” including the Research committee, which has been investigating recent plans to change the Microsoft OneDrive usage policies for data storage. While the committee already learned there are not yet definitive plans for OneDrive, “there is some confusion so far as to what that means. The committee will continue to learn more as the semester progresses.”
Kanthak said she’s glad to report a “strong response to our call” for faculty members to stand for election for Faculty Assembly roles, noting that the University Senate and its committees expect information about balloting from the Senate office soon.
In her last report item, Kanthak said it's with “mixed feelings that we learned of the retirement decision” of Marc Harding, vice provost for enrollment. “Marc has been a great friend to shared governance (including) many of us here in the Senate, and we wish him the best in this new chapter.”
‘Informed process’
The Educational Policies Committee is looking into the effects of ClassRanked, a new teaching survey administration system that will replace the software currently used by the Office of Measurements and Evaluation of Teaching (OMET) for teaching evaluations by this summer.
“Several faculty expressed concern to Educational Policies about the change … and what this will mean for how teaching evaluations will be included in overall faculty evaluations moving forward,” Kanthak said, noting the Senate was not included in the decision to move to ClassRanked. “Educational Policies will (now) ensure that the principles of shared governance are upheld as much as they can be at this point.”
Jon Stoner, chair of the Education Policies committee and a history, acknowledged that faculty members who brought up ClassRanked to the committee expressed concern about the mechanism by which decision making happened, Stoner said “a couple of dozen people, including a number of faculty,” shared a “fair amount of positive feedback about the platform itself coming.”
While it wasn’t a “solely a negative kind of moment,” he conceded that “we may need to clarify going forward” about when the administration recognizes a software platform might have shared governance implications, “how we massage that and make sure that the right people are in the right room.”
This, he added, did not happen in a “unilateral, top-down way, per se.” Some concerns stem from “Google search research about ClassRanked and some of its potential functionality, rather than through an informed process yet.”
“We welcomed both the concerns as well as the reassurance that it had not been a completely unilateral decision,” he said.
John Radzilowicz, the University Center for Teaching and Learning’s director of pedagogy, practice, & assessment, said that the ClassRanked transition is now part of his portfolio. He clarified that “this is strictly a software change. The OMETs are not going away. … The process for evaluation of teaching is not changing. It is strictly a software change.
“There was a committee of 30 before my time as director … including faculty, who were involved.”
Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.
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