ATAC MINUTES

Meeting opened at 2 p.m. on Friday, November 2, 2007

Attendees included:

Linda Beith
Jennifer Hurrell
Fera Karakaya
Carol Panaccione
Bill Pellicio
Cathy Poirier
Tricia Wilhelm
Tom Whitfield

Agenda
ITAC Update – Tom Whitfield updated the committee on the ITAC meeting held the previous week.

Technology Renewal update – Fera reviewed the capital available this year for technology renewals and went over the proposed distribution of equipment. The distribution is based on CCRI’s Technology Renewal Plan.

STEM update - Fera went over the STEM projects slated for Year 2 of the STEM grant along with an update on the completion of all STEM Year 1 projects. She noted that the State is holding CCRI to the projects detailed in the original proposal and is not allowing for changes.

Distance Learning Advisory Committee – Linda passed out the final draft of the Distance Learning Recommendations that are the result of two years of work by the Distance Learning Advisory Committee. These recommendations have been forwarded to Vice President Lela Morgan for discussion and approval by the Department Chairs and the President’s Council.

RI Distance Learning Task Force – Linda passed out CCRI’s response to Ed Klonoski, President of the Connecticut Distance Learning Consortium, who has been hired as a consultant to the RI Distance Learning Task Force to respond to the State of Rhode Island’s House Resolution H6239. This resolution charges the Office of Higher Education to conduct a comprehensive study on the feasibility of establishing an accredited distance learning program for the State. Ed had sent out initial questions to Task Force members to inform him on the current state of distance learning at each of the institutions. The consultant will write and present the report to the Legislature in January 2008.

Revised CCRI web site policy – Linda went over the revisions made to the CCRI web site policy with the Committee. The following changes were made:

In the paragraph under Policy Statement: changed delineated to described

In the paragraph under Information Provider – change sentence to read: A CCRI employee appointed by the department head or senior administrator is responsible for each entity that seeks to publish on the CCRI web site. The Information Provider is responsible for maintaining that entity’s web pages.

Under Who may publish on the web site, paragraph two, change personal to professional

Policy was approved with these changes.

Web form input – Kay Johnson had sent a request from a chairperson to have forms like the IT New Initiatives form be available in Word format in addition to Acrobat format so that they could be completed electronically. This request was approved.

Online student permission for course overrides – Bill brought up an issue that online students have with trying to add courses that are closed. Bill had sent an e-mail permission to an online student to add one of his courses which was closed. He directed the student to forward the e-mail to Enrollment Services so that they could do the course override for him. Enrollment Services responded that the student must come to campus and locate the faculty member to have him sign the paper form and then return it to their office in order to be added to the closed course. Since online students may not live locally this presents a hardship. Linda noted that the Distance Learning Advisory Committee has included a recommendation for an expansion of Student Services to be more accessible to distance students in the recommendations that are now under consideration by the Vice President of Academic Affairs.

Lab usage by Non-CCRI users – Bill mentioned that one of his former students had been turned away from the academic computing lab at Providence because he was no longer a student. Bill questioned why CCRI was not opening its labs to the community. Fera detailed the problems that the Providence lab was experiencing from non-student use and noted that CCRI students must have first priority to work on academic work. The limited number of computers in that lab often results in students having to wait to get their school work done so steps were taken to check IDs in order to ensure that the computers were available for student use first. In follow-up research, Dave Judd, the manager of the labs and classrooms, discovered that CCRI students are being permitted to use RIC and URI computer labs as long as they show their IDs so that courtesy is also extended to RIC and URI students in all our labs as well.

Meeting adjourned at 3:15 p.m.