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Minutes of Meetings:
May 25, 2000
Olin 101

Present: C. Batston, D. Cossey, D. Keller, D. Klein, C. Traver

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Review of last meeting's minutes

1. Update on Union's Distance Learning plans
    - selecting DL software - Blackboard will be on campus June 15 for a demonstration.  All interested in web-assisted courses should be invited.
    - GMI plans - The MA in Bioethics proposal is moving forward.  The first online course is scheduled to run Fall 2001.
    - IVDS plans - 10 rooms are funded under the Keck grant.  Five will be located in Olin 110.  Others will be in various locations.  Candidate locations inlcude Social Sciences, the Library, Humanities, and at some future date, perhaps residence halls.  The purpose of these rooms will be to enable small (2-5 person) teams from Union to do collaborative projects with similar teams at other institutions around the world.  Of course, we need to worry about facilities are availble at the remote sites.  Kesheng Yu has been asked to form a group to explore the best ways of using these rooms.  Our engineers have some experience with international design teams.  Hamilton and Colgate have done distance courses in Italian, and Lehigh and Lafayette have done some distance learning.  We should contact them to learn about their experiences.

2. The memo to AAC will have one slight change to reflect the fact Union currently does not give college credit for courses offered in high schools by HS teachers.  We mean to include this existing policy in the phrase: "these courses meet the same requirements as other transfer and cross-registered courses".   We are not sure whether the HS policy is written anywhere, but Doug Klein will check with the Registrar and the Admissions office to see. 
Download a copy of the AAC memo (in Word97 format).

3. Announcements.  The following projects are in the works:
N210 - will be completed with full multimedia lectern.
HU016 - will become an electronic presentation classroom.
OCS staff recently attended a meeting about our new internet connection.  The earliest we could get connected is December or January, so we will look into getting 4 T-1 lines for September.
The city has begun the Seward Place construction.

3. Update on U*STAR.   Diane Keller gave a status report on the U*STAR program.  (Visit the U*STAR web site.)

AT&T Grant proposal for 2000-2002

A two year grant has been submitted to AT&T to augment a portion of the costs to run the USTAR program. By early June we should hear if it is approved.

Move to Student Run Program

Head USTAR – Shaker Choudbury

USTAR Steering Committee - Terra Conlon; Nick Jones; Youseline Obas; Marquis Scott; Jason Slater; Lynne Vanderburen

Criteria to remain in USTAR program

During the Spring Term, each USTAR student must

• Complete 2 CBT courses
• Attend 2 live training courses

Courses to be offered

• Two additional classes of the Web page development
• One additional class of the Networking
• Three new classes in basic Mac support

Restructure for next year

• Pay for participation in USTAR activities not hourly raise
• Join USTAR by submitting application to join not by having "USTAR job"
• Boot Camp before Fall Term for general training and for ResNet training
• Go Dorm to dorm to help Freshmen connect to ResNet during first week of term

4. Targets for next academic year.  You might want to review the over-riding goals we set ourselves at our first meeting.

Establish a campus Intellectual Property Rights policy covering online courses and materials.

Monitor Distance Learning programs and policies for Union.

Budget - We need to help make the case for funding items that were left out of this year's budget -- enhanced internet connection (especially if we are to begin streaming video); replacement for Idol.

Bring in more speakers to talk about the effective use of technology in teaching and learning.  One name mentioned was Mark Taylor, Prof. of Humanities at Williams. He gave a talk on Liberal Arts and Technology at a recent NERCOMP meeting.

Next meeting:  No more meetings scheduled for this year.

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Page maintained by J. Douglass Klein, Associate Dean for Information Technology.
Last updated 05/26/2000