MELA Meeting Minutes 2003 - 2017

courses could be disabled, and any college that needs a Blackboard course enabled can notify Audra. iv. Keri Cole stated that some schools are not required to use external schools outside of Canvas. The apps within Canvas are easy for students to access and no user files are required to be sent by each college. However, with BB IM, the school has to send up a file for the user to have ability to access the tool. Discussing the pros/cons of colleges requiring BB IM should be discussed at a later date. 1. BB IM is working to improve their product so that schools do not have to send up a user file, rather the student would access BB IM through a single sign-on option within Canvas. Audra hopes this will be ready for Spring. Until then, each school will need to send a file. v. SAS training will be conducted soon. Audra mentioned there are two options for SAS webinar training: Essentials (2 hour training) and Advanced (2 hour training), and asked the group which session would be best. Elizabeth Spooner mentioned that she had taken Essentials training before, and it was very conceptual and wasn’t helpful. Keri Cole stated that training doesn’t need to be conceptual, but should be based on specific MSVCC usage. Audra Kimble will see if SAS training can be personalized for the MSVCC. i. Audra Kimble stated that there is an issue when uploading audit files, and errors are being created when a course did not make. Some colleges are leaving courses in the ET. Audra stated that colleges must archive or delete the course. 1. Tish Stewart stated that she still received errors after archiving. Jennifer Powell stated that she continued to have issues after deleting her courses. Audra will talk with her colleagues at State Board about this situation, and see about a solution.

c. Audit

d. Instructor of the Year

i. Audra will come up with standard documentation outlining the entire process before soliciting nominations. Ive Burnett will create a link for nominations. Five schools, MGCCC-SWMCC, will be on the judging panel this year.

e. Vendors

i. Vendors (ShareStream, AspireEdu, SoftChalk) from September’s BootCamp are calling Audra Kimble to see if we are interested in future discussion and purchasing. As a consortium, the group is not interested in ShareStream. SoftChalk will be adopted on an individual college basis. The consortium is interested in AspireEdu, and the company is interested in working with the MSVCC by lowering rates from $10 to $3 a user. ii. Keri Cole mentioned that local colleges are looking at retention software, also. Keri would like to have a ‘vendor-presentation’ day at Hinds, preferably before Christmas, where each college can bring along Institutional Effectiveness and other college representatives to attend and learn more about how to tie retention-type software programs to Canvas. iii. Each college should talk with their college retention specialists to discuss retention software that MSVCC is exploring . iv. Each college should send Audra Kimble the name and contact information for the student-success/retention specialist/other representative at their school.

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