SFC undergraduate education committee meeting 2006-11-29

Present: 4 UGs, 4 faculty. Chair = Christine

Introductions

• Undergrads met on 2 Nov; Christine handed out notes

Teaching quality

Seminars for better teaching

• Discussion of how to get faculty to participate
• Problem we are trying to solve: uneven teaching
• Perhaps set something up for new faculty (assistant professors)

TQFRs

• Use scantron forms? Publish the results
• GPS binds together TQFRs and hands out to all of the faculty
• Perhaps when you drop a course, you should have to fill out a questionnaire (why did you drop)
• Finding a way to provide feedback is very useful, but need to be careful that comments reflect teaching and not just the difficulty of the course
• Is there a forum where faculty get together to talk about teaching?
  • Could we create some sort of forum for interdivisional meetings?
• Who reads faculty evaluations and how does feedback happen?

Problems to solve

• Communication between professors and TAS - TAs don't know what the professors want
• Class web sites are useful; would like to see more of these
• Lecturing style
  • legibility of the writing; can't tell what they wrote
  • projection; speaking to the room instead of to an individual or the blackboard
• Materials out of data - sets were ignoring some new technology

Ideas

• Possibly survey ombuds next term to see what people are doing and what works
• Midterm survey in courses that we (people on the committee) are involved with
• Could we create more meetings between students and faculty?

Undergraduate workload

Advising

• Some students never meet with their advisors; except to get drop cards signed
• Some people take classes and then realize that it wasn't the right collection; nobody along the way who can provide advice
• Online course registration is convenient, but it cuts down on advisor/advisee communication

General theme

• More faculty/study interaction