ILLINOIS TECH UNDERGRADUATE STUDIES COMMITTEE

Meeting Minutes

Tuesday, January 14, 2025

12:45pm

Online via Zoom and In-person in PS-152

(pdf version available here)

Attending Voting Members: Fred Weening (AMAT), Nicole Legate (PSYC), Ishaan Goel (SGA), Kindon Mills (ARCH), John Twombly (SSB), Stephen Kleps (CAEE), Emily Leiner (PHYS), Yuting Lin (BIO), Matthew Bauer (CS),  Keigo Kawaji (BME), Murat Vural (MMAE), Victor Perez-Luna (CHBE), Jeremy Hajek (ITM)

Chairing Meeting: Kathir Krishnamurthy (FDSN)

Also Attending:   Katie Spink (Pre-Med), Melisa Lopez (Student Success & Retention), Lauren Woods (CLI), Nichole Novak (Libraries), Keith Alexander (UGAA), Ayesha Qamer (Registrar), Taylor Rojas (UGAA), Jeff Wereszczynski (UFC), Rich Klein (SSB), Joe Gorzkowski (UGAA), Diane Fifles (Univ Accred), Mary Jorgenson Sullivan (ELS), Melanie Jones (Armour Academy), Mary Haynes (UGAA), Shamiah Okhai (LCSL), Gabrielle Smith (UGAA), Zipporah Robinson (Academic Success), Christopher Lee (Registrar), Jennifer deWinter (LCSL), Kathy Nagle (ARCH), Kelly Roark (CLI), Kevin Cassel (VP Acad Affairs), Ray Trygstad (ITM)

Quorum was reached and the meeting was started at 12:49pm

1. Approval of the Meeting minutes. The meeting minutes of the November 12 meeting are available, but not the minutes for the November 26 meeting. Since the November 26 meeting had many items which were continuations from the November 12 meeting, we will wait on approving the November 12 minutes until the November 26 minutes are also available.

2. Approval of the proposed meeting agenda.  Kathir displayed the proposed agenda and indicated that it was quite short today. A motion to approve the agenda was made by Victor Perez-Luna and seconded by Kindon Mills. The motion passed without objection.

3. Welcome of new members to UGSC. Kathir indicated that UGSC will have some new representatives this semester, but that he wanted to wait to officially introduce the new members until all of their departments had a faculty vote taken to approve their positions as department representatives to UGSC (as opposed to being appointed by the department chair).

Kindon Mills asked for clarification. In the College of Architecture the UGSC representative has traditionally been the Dean of Academic Affairs for the College. Do you want the faculty to vote on the UGSC representative every time there is a change to the Dean of Academic Affairs? Kathir responded yes, from his reading of the faculty handbook, the UGSC representative of a department is an elected position and requires a vote. Jeff Wereszczynski agreed with Kathir’s answer, but stressed that it need not be an arduous process for the vote to occur.

4. The next agenda item was an update from the Course Evaluation Transition Team. Lauren Woods made the presentation. She displayed a powerpoint presentation entitled Enhancing Efficiency in Course Evaluations: Fall 2024 Transitioning to Blue by Explorance.

She indicated that phase one of the transition was completed in the Fall and produced the end-of-course evaluations for the Fall 2024 semester. Phase two is currently underway and aims to produce mid-semester evaluations as well as end-of-courses evaluations and deliver dashboard access providing statistical trends now that there will be more than one semester of data.

Some of the goals are to automate as many things as possible and to integrate the software both with Banner and Canvas. One of the issues with the old system, Qualtrics, was that it was not easily accessible for individual reports. Manually creating the individual reports was making the old system unsustainable.

In the new system, Blue, students will be able to access the evaluations from within Canvas and instructors will be able to see real-time completion rates of the evaluation. Blue also offers lots of customizable reporting.

Lauren described some of the challenges to implementing the system, with the main one being the time constraints to get the system up and running. She indicated that communication from faculty and departments as to what they would like the system to do is always appreciated.

Matt Bauer asked if there will be a way for departments to add questions just for their department. Lauren responded yes and that was one of the reasons Blue was selected as the new software.

Jennifer deWinter asked if they can get aggregate data for department chairs. Lauren indicated that this should already be available for the Fall 2024 evaluations. Jennifer also asked if the data could be integrated with the faculty annual reports. Lauren wasn’t sure of the answer to this question, but had reasons to suspect it should be possible. Finally, Jennifer asked if the team had the current list of faculty approved questions for the evaluations. Lauren said that she thought they had this, but there was some doubt on Jennifer’s part. Jeff Wereszczynski said he had the most recent report regarding the questions and would go over them together with Lauren.

Lauren indicated that if more questions arise they can be sent to her by email.

5. The next item was an update on the transition from Blackboard to Canvas. Kelly Roark gave a powerpoint presentation. The presentation included the following information.

• Blackboard had been the university’s Learning Management System from 2013 to 2024.
• Canvas was piloted in the summer of 2024 and officially became the university's LMS starting in Fall of 2024.
• The university offered previews, virtual workshops (330 registered participants), and in-person workshops (77 participants) to help train faculty in the use of Canvas.
• The results of satisfaction surveys regarding the workshops were very positive.
• Overall the responses from Illinois Tech community members has been that Canvas offers a better experience than Blackboard.
• Some of the tools that faculty have been most interested in learning about are the grade center, rubrics, and also credentials and badges.
• The CLI plans to continue to offer workshops to help orient new users and workshops on more advanced usage based on faculty interest. In addition it will continue to offer videos on its website and send out the CLI newsletter.

Murat Vural mentioned that he liked the Rubrics tool a lot when he used it in a lab course. He was hoping that he could use some of the data generated from Canvas to answer questions in evaluations for ABET and HLC, but there were some issues of data being aggregated when Canvas produced reports. So he had to do this manually, which was very time consuming. Kelly indicated that she and Lauren are working on getting the data that accreditation bodies want automated and that they will have workshops to help faculty and departments once they’ve worked out all the details.

The meeting adjourned at 1:46 pm.