Meeting with Dave Burrows (8-25-08)

Present: Berk, Burrows, Damerow, Fricke, Gilbert, Haurykiewicz
Subject: Institutional support for the course redesign project

Meeting Notes:

• Review of lecture capture/time-shifting technology
• Our goal: to work in a coordinated way to support course redesign
• Burrows: we should use technology to support the goals of liberal education (e.g., faculty-student interaction); creating hybrid courses of the type we are proposing may open up time for other liberal arts activities (Burrows wants us to add a statement to this effect in our recruitment materials)
  
• Course releases: require support/permission of the faculty member's department chair and should be restricted to a certain (small) number of courses per year
  
• Burrows is hesitant to offer any course releases this academic year because courses are on the books, students have registered for them, etc.
• Faculty should use the LU Curricular Development Grant form (or our modified version of it) to request a course release (rather than financial support) for course redesign; Burrows typically only gets 1-2 of these grant requests a year; this form will be submitted to the Provost's Office and will be reviewed by him and our committee
  
• Arno: we should pitch the idea of "extending class time" through the use of technology such as lecture capture
• Pete: instructors could develop Moodle (or clicker) assessments to gauge where the class (or individual students) is/are in terms of understanding various concepts after viewing/listening to lectures--thereby allowing the instructor to focus on these issues in class; we could develop a "toolkit" of such assessment options
  
• The technology might be used to create more time for experiential learning (we should talk to /coordinate with alan Parks on this topic); Burrows: elite liberal arts collges are often describing their offerings in terms of experiential learning
• This technology could be used to individualize the learning in larger lecture courses; these courses are often pereceived as difficult to teach (esp. because students tend to enroll in such courses to fulfill GERs)
• See NCAT "Five Principles of Successful Course Redesign" website sent by Pete re: goals for course redesign
  
• Recruitment: announcement should describe the initiative in general and give a few key examples; talk about individualized learning/experiential learning possibilities; announce the initiative at a faculty meeting; announce in the fall and again at the beginning of Term II (this is when most faculty will be thinking about their course offerings for the 2009-10 academic year--we need to get faculty thinking about this before the 09-10 course schedule is established)
• Follow-up: Julie H. will draft an announcement about the initiative on Google Docs