Attendees: Krista Bargsten, Andrew Brusletten, Jen Lehner, Jason Smith, Maria Hopper,
Amanda Davis, Christine Noyes, Julia Carlson, John Drew
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Agenda items: (1) General review of the departments’ milestone information that committee members submitted last week, (2) discussion of questions posed by John Drew in order to flush out the academic progress tracking project.
*Julia and John will then design the general idea, and share it with all GPAs and
GPCs for their review and comment.
 Are the departments’ milestones categorized as program goals or student goals?
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*Are the goals and milestone definitions per student or per program? If it is
customizable by student, this is perhaps not the same as a milestone.
*Is the plan of study specific to the student? Departments seem to require some
specific core courses, but mostly it is based on total credits and the course plan
itself is flexible.
*Does/should the plan of study include goals that the student expresses? Is this
something that we want to build into the study?
-There was general agreement that it was sufficient and important for the program to facilitate just bare minimum requirement checks, though the
“ultimate” system would allow both the GPC/GPA to track progress
AND allow the student to share their goals.
-The overarching goal is for students to be aware of program requirements for graduation and so as to meet those requirements, so capturing the students’ individual plans/goals is helpful but not critical
- Not only is it difficult and messy to house all students’ goals, but it is difficult to track student objectives.
-While student participation is not part of our departments’ timelines, giving students the ability to state their ideas in a format viewable by departments and their faculty/advisors also encourages their ownership and participation in crafting (and thus fulfilling) their degree plan.
-It would be helpful to have examples of student objectives to better understand what sort of content would be included

Are milestones simply department recommendations/goals or actual requirements?
*Recommendations or goals not yet met in a student’s advising notes will not automatically halt their academic progress
- the citation in the advising notes IS itself the accountability measure for the student, and ensures that the student’s profile has been reviewed by the department and it has thus communicated with the student.\
-this program won’t “catch” every student, but is a good communication tool that will reach most of them

*This brings the committee back to the original question – Is there anything in departments’ milestone tracking that ISN’T a program requirement? NO.
-Milestones themselves are separate from what’s necessarily in the advising notes field, the bare minimum requirements.

If some milestones aren’t time-specific, how does the program handle that?
* Milestones are events that departments require students to do, that they’d like them to do at a particular time but often can accommodate delays
* Perhaps like with MyGrad Admissions program, departments could assign milestones to particular academic quarters/years with hard/soft deadlines.
* Some sort of update or check-up mechanism should be available in the notes field, where students and departments can communicate the details of a plan
-should be attached to the milestones, to ensure that students read them
-this has the added benefit of taking frequent reminder responsibilities off the advisors’ shoulders

How will the program actually work, and how much time are GPAs/GPCs willing to invest in maintaining and updating the system? What do we expect the system (versus the advisors) to track?
* It’s best for the Graduate School to manage as much of the process as possible.
The Graduate School can monitor and update the ‘automatic” milestones
(completion of core courses, etc.), but won’t be able to track other sorts of milestones such as internships and research experiences.
- Could a template email be sent to advisors/students to flag a milestone if the dates haven’t been met (similar to the color-coding used to verify degree/exam eligibility in MyGrad).
* There was a general consensus that advisors are already tracking this information in personal Excel-type files, so inputting the data in MyGrad is an easy process – that work is already being done, just in a less- efficient format/process.
- This raised a concern about a reporting system. As many advisor prepare internal reports (using the type of data that the proprosed program offers to record on their behalf), a simple, department-specific report function need to be built into the system so that advisors aren’t required to double-record (in MyGrad and internal department records).
-A report function with searchable categories would be a big time-saver for advisors (ex. Sort by milestone, student, next goal, next course intending to take).

Tracking will be per student, but will departments ever need to sort/track by cohort?
* Yes, this is important for departments with course sequencing – if a student misses a course that is only offered per year, she might need to join a new cohort.

* The entry Quarter/Year should be the default for cohorts, but could be altered.
Ultimately, the Graduate School will need to be told which alternative cohort to assign her to.
 Assuming that departments are “flexible” with milestone dates, how will they respond when the system notifies them that a student hasn’t meet the deadline ?
* Many committee members agreed that, though milestones are universal for all a department’s students, the departments would likely modify that particular student’s milestone and indicated the new study plan using the notes field.
* What if there is a milestone that isn’t required (optional elective, internships opportunity), but that has it’s own specific requirements?
-Perhaps a drop-down box can appear IF that milestone is selected, and the advisor will be responsible for recording satisfied requirements?
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What is the process of evaluation and communication? What is the interaction with students, when will data be entered?
* If an email notification template was available, departments could decide how often to run reports and contact students.
-the email transactions would be recorded for accountability purposes
-essential would be the ability to (1) copy the GPC/advisor on an email,
(2) select the specific recipient of the email per transaction, and (3) bookmark lists of students per report, so that advisors/GPCs aren’t sent a separate email for each student (too many!)
-FERPA and security/legal issues arise when emailing student records via a system-generated message, so perhaps the email template should use a basic template with anti-SPAM language and a URL that takes email recipient to the report, which they’d need a UW net ID to view.
* Some faculty are reluctant to use electronic systems, so reports would need to available via multiple mediums (similar to current GSR reports, where GSRs are sent a link to download, but GPAs also can print it in MyGrad).
* It’s not necessary for advisors to have access to MyGrad, but receiving a notification email would encourage them to be more involved in their student’s progress and degree plans. This is a meaningful way to support GPAs/GPCs, and encourages more students to get through the program in a timely manner.
* Aside from FERPA concerns, there are concerns about students actually receiving the email. With no audit trail, it’s difficult to ensure that the email has been delivered and read by the recipient. (Individually-prepared emails sent from the department are much less likely to be flagged as SPAM than a system- generated email from the Graduate School).
* ACTION ITEM: Committee members should consider and prepare a list of the types of emails the system should generate, and to whom (advisor,
GPC, etc.). The Graduate School will need to know how much communication to build into the system.

* ACTION ITEM: Committee members should consider and prepare a list of specific reports that they’d like to be able to run on tracking program.

Evaluation of progress – how, and how often?
* A satisfactory system will have (1) reports of basic milestones, (2) a plan of study that students can modify with their advisor’s approval, with a notification email sent to GPAs and GPCs, (3) a menu of program concentrations to allow for variable plans of study, and (4) a graduation audit.
 The minutes from last week’s meeting were approved.
 The agenda for next week’s meeting will focus on the two action items (creating lists of system-generated emails and lists of reports to be run) and a review of how the Graduate
School has designed the basic program after reviewing the committee’s previous discussions.
 The committee’s last meeting will focus on laying out the project roadmap and prioritizing the “wish list” and actions over the next two years.
 The committee’s next meeting is scheduled for Monday, June 7th at 9am.