MELA Meeting Minutes 2003 - 2017

III.

Approval of December 2012 Minutes.

Jennifer Leimer made the motion to accept minutes; Phyllis Johnson seconded the motion. Motion carried. IV. Unfinished Business a. Review of MELO-Keri asked that everyone look at the site and share thoughts. If changes needed to be made then we might ask a sub-committee to look at it. Jennifer Leimer mentioned it was hard to look at it and review without specific tasks. She felt it was easy to review. Do we have appropriate data bases? Do we need a broad search option to search all data bases? Keri asked we table it and bring our findings to the February meeting. New Business a. Retention/Failure Rates-Vanessa Alexander mentioned how they started teaching first short term/second short term and reviewing the failure rates. Do we have standards in place regarding retention as a group? Buffy Matthew stated that after offering short terms for several years they have noted a higher retention rate for short term due to financial aid, students needed the course to remain in the program, etc. MGCCC does monitor retention rates and the department chair evaluates them to determine reasoning for lower/higher retention rates. Some colleges use retention rates to determine who will teach the short term courses. b. Standardized Buttons-Keri mentioned that the standardized buttons would change with the move to Canvas and we need to hammer out what buttons we would like as a group. We cannot change the names/protocol of the buttons per the move to Canvas. We still retain the ability to hide buttons, etc. Keri recommended that a committee take on the task of reviewing the buttons and the policy since current policy states that we have a standardized button. Jennifer Leimer’s committee is going to review the buttons and policy and bring back to the group at the February meeting. c. JSU/USM Agreement-Christian stated that with the change to Canvas it will change the instance and how students will access the Canvas courses. They can log into mccb. Instructure.com or we can create an individual URL. Christian recommended we keep it simple to ensure ease of use for students. Both have agreed to keep the partnerships and want to continue working with us as we move forward. Christian asked that once we have training materials available that we make it available to USM and JSU to ensure that students have ease of use. d. Migrating Spring Content to Canvas-Christian has sent an email to the group the yesterday and asked us to review our options on how we can transfer our content from Bb to Canvas.1) move content in to Canvas but it does not lay out nice and neat. 2) Upload content individually to ensure clean content and use of features and functionality. Christian stated it would be 20,000 courses to be loaded and we would have to match usernames etc. which could lead to error. Or we can copy just specific content like quizzes, exams, etc. Or we can watch Jing videos and teach faculty how to do it themselves. Christian was not trying to persuade anyone but did say that Canvas says it is usually easier to just start from scratch with a clean slate to avoid any excess materials, convoluted content, publisher content issues. If we move content from Bb to Canvas, Canvas is not responsible for items that do not work. Jennifer mentioned the issue with textbook changes taking place during the summer and instructors are worried about building courses in the summer and then having to rebuild in fall with a new textbook edition. Tish stated we needed dates to make formal decisions. Christian is going to have Dave export all active data onto an external hard drive which will store our data. We would then have to V.

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