Academic Technology Committee Final Report (2013-2014)
Original Charges
Classroom Design Guidelines: Determine the common items that need to be included in new
or remodeled classrooms. Provide feedback to ITS on current classroom configuration.
Lecture Capture: Continue to track lecture capture needs across campus and provide
guidance to ITS on future needs.
Guidelines for Electronic SEI: Continue to work on formal guidelines for electronic SEIs. Of
particular importance was eliminating the opposing senate directives for SEI usage as part of
the TAI reports and the data deletion for electronic SEIs. Secondary was helping to bring the
electronic data collection in-line with previous faculty senate policy and provide overall guidance
on the process of data collection and results distribution for SEIs in general.
Review by-laws to clarify committee’s role: Now that the committee has been in place for a
few years, review the bylaws and committee membership and note any changes requested.
What we accomplished
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Of the original charges we focused first on the Classroom Design guidelines, in part
because we were unaware of how much time the electronic SEIs were going to take to
sort out. As part of the classroom design, we surveyed the faculty on their current usage
of classroom technology as well as their desires for future components. The survey
results were communicated to ITS for their incorporation into their design. Informally,
the committee recommended that ITS work more closely to identify the faculty involved
in any classroom update and modification. Since the survey results were provided to
ITS late in the spring, no formal procedure was requested from them.
Questions dealing with lecture capture were included in the classroom usage survey.
During the 2012-2013 academic year, ATC recommended and faculty senate passed a
data retention policy for electronic SEI data that was at odds with the desire to have the
TAI forms filled in automatically by ITS based on electronic data. This conflict was
resolved through a series of recommendations forwarded to and then passed by faculty
senate (attached). The implementation of these recommendations is expected to take
some time and will need to be coordinated with ITS. I note that with many vested
interests involved in the SEIs, that there appears to be no single committee that is well
suited to tackle SEIs in all of their complexity. However, since SEIs are supposed to be
one of many different measures of instructor effectiveness, committing many more
resources to the problem may not be the answer.
In an effort to understand why students do not complete the online SEIs, an end of the
year survey was administered to those students who had not completed their SEIs.
Approximately 75% of respondents had forgotten to finish their SEIs or didn’t know what
day they ended. The rest chose to not complete the SEIs for a variety of reasons, the
primary reasons revolve around perceived usefulness (that the results are ignored by
faculty) and perceived lack of confidentiality.
Review of bylaws was completed with no suggestions for changes.
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Based in part on the comments of in the classroom usage survey and on faculty
communication with individual committee members, the committee requested from ITS
their standard operating procedures for the following items:
o Classroom redesigns and updates
o Imaged versus non-imaged machines
o Site license software (decisions, access, etc)
o Computer purchasing/replacements
o Support for legacy systems (VHS, slides, etc).
With the exception of the legacy systems procedure, no written operating procedures
were provided by ITS. Dr. Elhindi and his staff did provide a presentation on what ITS
does in these areas.
Recommendations for next year’s committee
• Continue working with ITS to implement the long-term recommendations on SEI data
collection, retention, and disbursement as passed by faculty senate during 2012-2013.
In addition, the response rates need to be monitored to see if any of the changes made
last year have improved student involvement. It is an open question who is in charge of
increasing response rates and dealing with the misconceptions of students. ATC may
not be the best place for this discussion.
• Develop and seek faculty senate approval for procedures outlined above (classroom
design, computer replacement/ordering/imaging, and site license software). Based on
faculty communication to individual committee members as well as comments in the
classroom usage survey suggest that the lack of transparency and responsiveness on
these items are of top concern to many faculty.
Submitted by Dan Grilley, 7/2014
Academic Technology Committee SEI Recommendataions:
Review of the standard document used by ITS to train department chairs and ADAs on the on-line SEI
management (http://www.uwlax.edu/wings/help/SEI/Online%20SEI%20User%20Guide.pdf) lead to the
following recommendations:
Simple changes to SEI administration:
1. Shorten the email messages asking students to participate. The current version has the entire
“SEI” message and is probably immediately deleted. The original message can be found on page
14 of the ITS document. Note that the full SEI message is still found on the main WINGS SEI page
for each student (pg 16 of ITS document). The version of the email message recommended by
ATC is shown below. Student name, the window to take SEIs, and individualized links will be filled
in.
>>> Email Text >>>
Dear ________,
Course Evaluations are an important means for faculty to gain insight into your classroom
experience. Between ___ and ____ you have the opportunity to provide feedback for each of
your instructors. Please follow the link below to complete your evaluations.
LINK TO WINGS
You can also access the course evaluations during this time period from the “Student Center” of your
WINGS account.
Thank you for taking the time to help improve the instruction at UW-L.
Sincerely,
Heidi McPherson
Provost and Vice-Chancelor for Academic Affairs
<<< END OF TEXT <<<
2. Eliminate white-space between questions in the survey. This will make it easier for students to see
the entire survey in one page and not give up (see page 9 or 16 in the ITS document for a current
example).
3. Move the window of available times to not correspond with the last week of classes.
Suggestion: "The window for on-line SEI administration will be weeks 5 and 6 for first-half of the
semester classes and weeks 12 and 13 for full and second-half semester courses (April 21
through May 2 for this year)." Not covered by this policy is this semester’s first-half of the
semester courses, on-line courses, and short duration courses.
4. Gather data to help answer the question: did students ignore the email solicitations or actively
decide not to fill out the on-line SEIs. This was formally requested by Faculty senate last year but
was not implemented.
Proposal: After the end of the SEI window ITS will send an email to all students who failed to
complete all of their SEIs. They will be asked to take a brief survey with one required question
(yes/no). The one question will be: "Did you consciously decide not to fill out the on-line
SEIs?" This will be followed by an optional free response "Why did you not complete
the SEIs?".
We seek approval from Faculty Senate of these recommendations, to be implemented by ITS before
the administration of the Spring 2014 SEIs.
A meeting with ITS staff helped to formulate the following list of technological improvements to the SEI
system at UW-L. Some of these items represent long term projects for ITS and may not be finished
until the next academic year. ATC makes the following prioritized recommendations:
Technological improvements
1) Data Retention
a. Store only summary data for each instructor on a class by class basis.
b. Delete all primary SEI responses as soon as allowed per UW-System policy after summary
data is created (6 months, see page 15-16 of http://www.uwsa.edu/general-counsel/legaltopics/records/managing-records/general-schedules-and-services/).
c. Delete summary data per UW-System policy.
2)
Improve security of on-line SEI storage by working to limit emailing of SEI data.
a. Develop automatic routines for generating all of the reports such that ADAs or department
chairs do not have to “run” any reports but just download data (see page 17 of ITS SEI
document).
b. Develop protocols to help curb emailing of SEI data by ADAs or department chairs.
1. Link to download page with data for all instructors in a department sent to all
approved persons for each department after reports are automatically generated.
2. Link sent to individual instructor to download own data. Include department
averages in data individual instructors can download.
3)
Automate filling in TAI reports to include all of the data needed by JPC.
4)
Allow data from paper SEI forms to be treated like data from the on-line SEI forms.
We seek approval from Faculty Senate of the both the contents and relative priorities of this list.
Evaluation Definition:
The official UW-L Student Evaluation of Instruction is comprised of the following six questions.
1. I was looking forward to taking this course.
2. The instructor was helpful to students.
3. The instructor was well prepared.
4. The instructor communicated the subject matter clearly.
5. I learned a great deal from this instructor.
6. Overall, this instructor was excellent.
These data will be collected for any instructor of a course in accordance with the guidelines adopted by Faculty
Senate. Data for these questions will be maintained by ITS pursuant to the University Data Retention Policy.
Data Retention for Non-University Required Questions:
ITS will continue to generate reports summarizing the data collected for department and/or individual
questions. ITS will maintain raw data for these non-university required questions until the first of June
in the calendar year following the current academic year (for the 2012-2013 academic year, data would
be deleted on June 1st 2014). At this time, both the raw data and summaries will be deleted from ITSmaintained databases. It is the responsibility of the department or the individual faculty to preserve
these data in accordance with the appropriate UW-System Record Retention Schedule(s).
University Data Retention Policy Options For Official Evaluations:
Used by ITS to govern the retention of the data and summaries for the official UW-L Student Evaluation
Option 1: Publish the data
Publish all data from the 6 university questions in the reference section of the UW-L Library for student
or the public to investigate on their own.
Option 2: Indefinite Retention
All data are kept forever.
Any evaluation will be forever available as an open record request.
Option 3: Fully Restrictive
Individual evaluations are kept until June first after the following academic year.
Summary data linked to individual faculty will be retained as per the Records Schedule (see Appendix
A below), with IAS treated like probationary faculty.
*Option 4: Hybrid retention (faculty and student data are divorced)
Individual evaluations are kept until the first of June in the calendar year following the current academic
year.
On June first the following will happen.
1. Faculty summary data are regenerated – allows any corrections due to misprocessing of data
by ITS (applicable predominately to paper SEIs). WINGS will maintain a class by class SEI
record for each faculty consisting of the fractional median score for each of the six university
questions.
2. Student summary data are generated. WINGS will maintain a term by term SEI record for each
student for each of the six university questions. Courses will be randomized for each question
within each term. No course identifiable information will be maintained. For terms where only
one course is taken no record will be maintained.
Retention of data:
Faculty summary data will be retained as per the Records Schedule, with IAS treated like
probationary faculty (see Appendix A below)).
Student summary data will be retained as per the Records Schedule.
Background:
On January 31, 2013, Faculty Senate charged the Academic Technology Committee with providing oversight
for the on-line SEI system. As part of that charge, the ATC recommended, and Senate passed, a campus
policy that the data from on-line SEIs be deleted yearly on December 1st for the previous academic year.
Assuming that departments were downloading all SEI reports and maintaining them as per the UW-System
Records Retention Schedule for Unclassified Staff (see Appendix A below), we believe this policy is in
compliance with the law.
However, Faculty Senate had previously passed a separate policy that said that SEI data must be used for
faculty promotion decisions. This requirement would seem to be at odds with the data deletion policy, and the
data deletion policy was put on hold. In an effort to resolve this the ATC, in conjunction with Dr. Bob Hoar, Mr.
Michael Gasper, and Mr. Scott Holzem JD, has worked out a set of definitions as well as Data Retention
options that both meet the legal obligations of the campus and satisfies the administration’s desire to maintain
data for TAI reports.
After seeking guidance from UW-System Office of General Counsel, we were able to summarize the criteria for
SEI data retention as follows.
1) The campus can define what an evaluation is for itself.
2) Any data taken as part of that evaluation is considered an public record.
3) If desired, we can delete the raw data after 6 months and the summary data per the UW-System
Records Retention Schedule for Unclassified Staff.
4) The data that must be kept is still an public record, regardless of the location.
These criteria guided the options presented above.
Appendix A (Abridged UW-System Records Schedule – Unclassified Staff)
Full text of the UW-System Records Retention Schedule is available at:
http://www.uwsa.edu/general-counsel/pdf-docs/grs-unclassified.pdf
(Modified by highlighting for emphasis)
Page 4:
E. Records to be retained.
In accordance with Wisconsin law, records to be retained are those defined as in the Wisconsin Statutes as
“public records,” that are made or received by any university employee in connection with the transaction of
university business. See Wis. Stat. § 16.61(2)(b).
Public records do not include the following:
1. Duplicates maintained by a university employee only for convenience or reference and for no other
substantive purpose.
2. Unsolicited notices or invitations which are not related to any official action taken, proposed, or
considered by the University of Wisconsin System.
3. Drafts, notes, preliminary computations and like materials intended for personal use by an individual
university employee or prepared by a university employee in the name of the person for whom the
employee is working.
4. Routing slips and envelopes.
5. Materials that are purely the personal property of a university employee and have no relation to his or
her office.
Records that are not “public records” under the definition may be destroyed at the discretion of university
administrators.
Pages 15-16:
STUDENT EVALUATIONS AND SUMMARIES
UWPER032 Tenured Faculty:
UWPER033 Probationary Faculty:
UWPER034 Academic Staff and TA's, PA's:
EVT= Date of the final appointment decision.
This series consists of statistical and/or narrative evaluation forms and summaries completed by students
concerning the teaching performance of individual faculty or academic staff. Student evaluation information can
be used to support tenure application as well as academic staff indefinite appointment.
Retention:
Campuses: For faculty and academic staff, transfer a copy of evaluation summaries to the individual’s
Official P-File if such is prepared.
If no summaries are prepared then evaluations must be retained according to the schedule outlined below:
Original Summaries:
UWPER032 Tenured Faculty: EVT + 5 Years.
EVT= Date of end of semester in which evaluations were completed.
UWPER033 Probationary Faculty: EVT + 6 Years.
EVT= Date of end of tenure review process
UWPER034 Academic Staff and TA's, PA's: EVT + 2 Years.
EVT= Date of end of semester in which evaluations were completed.
NOTE: If summaries have been prepared on ALL of the above, the actual evaluations need only be
retained 6 months and destroy.
Destroy Confidentially. PII/Confidential