Faculty Senate News

Meeting Notes 4/8/22

April 11, 2022  / Anna Carlin 

Following are noteworthy happenings from the April 8th Faculty Senate meeting.

  1. Members of the team working on FGCU's micro-credentials and digital badges team shared a presentation about the development of the transferable skills digital badges. More information, including a short video, can be found on the digital badges website.  We ran out of time during this item on the agenda before we could answer everyone's questions, so please contact a member of the digital badges team (Aysegul Timur, Kristen Vanselow, Glenn Whitehouse to name a few) or submit a question to the Faculty Senate Executive Team and we will post answers on the blog.
  2. Dr. billY Gunnels shared a presentation about all of the initiatives under the umbrella of the Office of Scholarly Innovation and Student Research. Classy printed booklets were also left in the care of your Faculty Senate President. If you missed picking one up, I will bring the next meeting.
  3. We revisited the SPoI recommendations made by the Faculty Affairs Team (FAT). Based on the feedback received following the March 25 Faculty Senate meeting, the FAT was able to provide a complete set of recommendations that the Faculty Senate may vote on at the April 22 meeting. The full recommendation with detail and examples has been provided by the FAT. Here is a simple list of recommendations that Faculty Senate will consider on April 22:
      1. A statement about bias in students' evaluation or perceptions of instruction should be included upon entry to view SPoI results online. This is a change from the March 25 recommendation that had the statement in the introduction to the instrument itself.
      2. Results should be displayed as distributions of answers without means/averages. Response rates should be displayed (# of responses vs. # enrolled students).
      3. Mode of instructional delivery should be displayed.
      4. SPoI results should displayed in a visually attractive webpage with a search engine that allows the public to purposefully search for SPoI results.
  4. Faculty Senate officers were nominated for election for 2022-23.  Elections will take place at the next meeting. Nominations will still be accepted for VP, Parliamentarian, Secretary, and CO at the next meeting. Nominations were made as follows:
      1. President - Anna Carlin
      2. Vice-President - Lyndsay Rhodes
      3. Secretary -  Tammy Sadighi
      4. Parliamentarian- Senthil "BeeJay" Girimurugan
      5. Communications Officer - Dan Hieu Vo
  5. The Faculty Senate bylaws (Faculty Governance Document) was updated with language to include University Advising as a unit for the purposes of faculty governance, allowing in-unit faculty Advisors to elect Senators and Senate team members.  The new document has been posted to the website and the Executive Team will notify stakeholders.
  6. The 2024-2025 Academic Calendar as drafted by the Institutional Affairs Team was approved.