Transfer Oversight Committee Meeting Notes

Minnesota State Colleges and Universities
Transfer Oversight Committee Meeting Notes
10:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m., Friday, October 21. 2005
Wells Fargo Place, Conference Room 306B, St. Paul, MN

Members Present: Ray Anschel, Nancy Black, Monte Bute, Joan Costello, Brian Donovan, Jean Evens, Louise Hoxworth, Greg Mulcahy, Anne O’Meara, Annette Schoenberger, JoAnn Simser, Dan Sperling, Michael Spitzer, Steve Whipple, Carol Ziehlsdorf, Guest: Mike Lopez
Members Not Present: Nicki Bottko, Derek Hudyma, Betsy Ingram-Diver, Debra Japp, Larry Oveson, Scott Wrobel

1. Review Transfer Oversight Committee (TOC) August 8, 2005 meeting notes:
August 8, 2005 meeting notes were approved with the following changes:

that individual institutions explore having an Academic Forgiveness Policy
MUSAAF abbreviation #3: should be “of” not “on.”

Revised August 8, 2005 meeting notes as approved are posted to www.mntransfer.org

Charge statement: A question was raised: if members are required to support recommendations and that requires unanimous consent, do we need a vote? If it is a voting committee, we need to restructure. Recommendations are result of committee consensus; any objections are duly noted. Each member could raise objections when notes are received in written form.

Credit for Prior Learning (CPL): A survey is going out to institutions October, 2005. A workgroup led by Linda Lade will analyze the results and consider implications for policy.

Recommendation: Put Credit for Prior Learning on future agenda—request Linda Lade address survey results and policy recommendations.

2. Committee organization, chair, setting agenda

Committee Organization, chair, recorder: A concern was expressed whether the committee is truly authentic as an advisory body to Sr. Vice Chancellor and whether the representative is voice heard, when both presiding and recording individuals are employees of Office of the Chancellor. No one volunteered to serve as chair or recorder. Several members of the group did not see it as a current problem. If that changes, the committee will add it to a future agenda and discuss membership, chair and facilitator. It was suggested that staff continue the practice of meeting with IFO and MSCF presidents between spring and fall meetings and that unions be appraised of issues.

Agenda: Agenda items are generated from discussion at TOC meetings, system workplans, and requests from TOC members, campuses, Office of Chancellor staff, and others. The agenda is distributed prior to the meeting and members have an opportunity to request additions, changes, priorities and time spent on items.

Recommendations:
1)      Continue with JoAnn Simser as chair to facilitate the meetings and Louise Hoxworth as recorder.
2)      Distribute meeting notes to members for proposed changes and review at the next meeting.
3)      Review committee organization at the first meeting in fall, 2006.

3. Academic Forgiveness-Mike Lopez

The Satisfactory Academic Progress and Grading Study Group Position Statement on Academic Forgiveness has been changed based on comments at the policy council meeting to include a note indicating the position statement was adopted by study group and the date adopted. An electronic copy of the changes will be distributed to TOC members.

Would there be two records of academic progress—academic transcript and a separate one for financial aid (page 2)? There is only one transcript, but there will be a notation when academic forgiveness occurs on the transcript. Academic forgiveness is not honored for financial aid; the institution must consider all courses. There is currently only one GPA on the transcript; ISRS can accommodate both GPA’s with and without considering academic forgiveness; but not right now.

This is not a recommendation for a system policy on academic forgiveness, but a recommendation to CAOs and presidents, asking they initiate discussion with faculty to see if faculty want to have an institutional policy. 21 institutions have a policy on academic forgiveness; 18 do not. Policies and practices vary among institutions. There are differences among state universities, technical colleges and community colleges. The study group recommends the policy include a requirement that in order to be considered for academic forgiveness a student may not have attended any college or university for three to five years. Existing institution policies require one to seven years. The committee discussed the recommendation that previous D and F grades be ignored in the computation of the new GPA, but the student be allowed to keep grades of C or better in the GPA. The group felt this should be discussed, the IFO doesn’t support it. The study group recommended the transfer oversight committee consider consistent treatment of academic forgiveness by transfer institutions.

Recommendations:

The Transfer Oversight Committee supports the request by the Satisfactory Academic Progress and Grading Study Group that institutions that currently do not have a policy on Academic Forgiveness consider the development of a policy that is student centered and academically sound.
Consistency in Academic Forgiveness policies among transferring institutions is not essential. The receiving institution needs to apply the same policies to direct entry and transfer students. The student has a choice of what institution to attend. The student has an advisor to help them through the process.

3. Minnesota Transfer Curriculum (MnTC) Institutional Self Evaluation

MnTC Development and Intent: The committee reviewed the origins and development of the MnTC agreement. The MnTC Agreement was developed in 1992-1994 in a faculty developed and driven process. General education was assumed as a premise to the Minnesota Transfer Curriculum. The assumption was that general education represented traditional areas of human inquiry, communication, social sciences, math and science and the humanities. The developers did not anticipate the challenges to general education in the last 15 years. There was no anticipation it would evolve in different directions. The systems were responding to a perceived threat from the legislature establishing common course numbering. The developers moved to looking at general education in terms of goal areas and competencies to get away from turf challenges, to allow institutions flexibility in course numbers and structure and to gain agreement. The lower division general education consists of 40 credits out of the total 120 credits required for a baccalaureate degree. General education has different purpose than other 80 credits or two-thirds of the baccalaureate degree. Now institutions are looking at it backwards: if a course meets 51% of the competencies, it is then general education. That was not the way it was intended.

The TOC could send a cover letter to the institutions stating that the MNTC is a faculty developed agreement and communicating the original perspective as described in the Overview to the 1994 Minnesota Transfer Curriculum Agreement. The cover letter should state that the self review is requested by the Transfer Oversight Committee and a list of committee members should be included.

Faculty Credentials: The MNTC was tied to the credentials of faculty teaching general education. Requiring a minimum of a Master’s degree in the discipline was a means to assure faculty knew what content should be taught in the discipline. There is a concern that if faculty don’t need a master’s degree, we will be undoing many things.

Guidelines for Review and Design of a Minnesota Transfer Curriculum: The guidelines were developed by faculty. In the beginning there was little trust among faculty statewide; guidelines were spelled out and specific to capture the core of what they could trust each other about. Participants in the original MNTC group state the guidelines were ways for institutions to determine what MnTC should be, they were not suggestions, they were principles to develop MnTC. There were to be no business, comp science, health and other application courses. There may now be some health and business courses that may accomplish what general education was intended to be. In goal 6 some are defining 6A and 6B, do we need to add another goal for the fine arts and define them better? Guideline #6 traditional lab course and lab-like experience--D. Japp was not present and the item was not discussed.

Guidelines could be sent out to be applied as per the original intention, black and white. How do we deal with institution’s concerns about the guidelines? We need a faculty-based process to review the changes to guidelines. How has curriculum changed over time, is there enough trust to broaden or redefine it? We may need to involve faculty within the disciplines, e.g. math. If faculty determine the process, they’ll buy into it, whether or not there’s a unified view.

Review/Update of Minnesota Transfer Curriculum Agreement: Someone raised the issue of reviewing and amending/updating the actual Minnesota Transfer Agreement (1994) itself. General education has evolved over the last 15 years. Maybe it is time to re-look at the agreement.

University of Minnesota Involvement: The University of Minnesota was involved in the development of the MNTC. The University of Minnesota website and the U of M Transfer Specialists state that they honor the Minnesota Transfer Curriculum at all campuses. Some of the guidelines are there because the University of Minnesota would not accept certain courses. Have there been any meetings with the University of Minnesota? The Office of the Chancellor staff (Leslie Mercer) communicates with Craig Swan at the University of Minnesota on a regular basis. Leslie Mercer has stated that it is her understanding U of M is going to look at their general education in 06-07. It would be beneficial to look at ours. The Office of the Chancellor is willing to approach the U of M, but we would need to know what the Transfer Oversight Committee wanted in terms of different guidelines.

Benefits of MnTC: The Minnesota Transfer Curriculum has improved transfer of general education for students. Before the MNTC each institution required a single course for every discipline; there were different categories; there was no consistency. The MNTC categorizes similar courses in different areas. Most of the discussion is about fringe areas, not within it; if we know what to do with those, we can get general agreement.

Requesting a Self-Review--Benefits and Concerns: The group discussed the benefits and concerns about requesting institutions to review courses for inclusion in the MNTC. There was a concern that provosts or CAO’s would not follow through on a directive to conduct the review, and that there was no way to enforce the MNTC. One person suggested we don’t do a review but figure out outliers and request the state office to put pressure on outliers to be cleaned up--find realistic plan to improve worst offenses. There are a lot of political issues, look at Florida where the legislature mandated common course numbering. Don’t give up any power to chancellor’s office or the legislature, but reexamine it ourselves. We need a good process for self review for the administration and the faculty at the institutions to conduct it. There is value in evaluating general education; it makes faculty think about what’s meant for general education. What do we consider to be a well educated person? Competencies were not meant to be first. If there are things an institution wants to change, we need to have conversations.

Disciplines and Competencies: Guidelines follow a disciplinary model rather than competency based model. The goals are based on competence, not discipline. In the MNTC competencies and goals, some are broad and some specific. It is hard to correlate competencies with disciplines based when some goal categories (theme areas 7-10) don’t have anything to do with disciplines. We need to explain it. The MNTC integrates disciplines and competencies, emphasizes membership in a common community and lays out a broad outline. Preceding the competencies, courses must be broad and foundational that would invite students to be students of the discipline. Competencies are under umbrella of disciplines, not opposed to them. That information is essential before the institutions can review courses for inclusion in the MNTC. Institutions need to clean up outliers. Faculty need to decide what outliers are.

Moving Forward: We need to consider as a system how to move forward, have conversations about general education, framework and process, faculty discussions, based on Greater Expectations and work with CTL to put together a process to do general education discussion. Gary Langer suggested we might have faculty co-chairs of discussion. The Associate Vice Chancellors recommended we go ahead with all 3: general education review, guidelines, and the request for self-review with the process agreed to by the Transfer Oversight Committee. We have the checklist, guidelines, and the proposed self-evaluation, revised 9/8/05. The Transfer Oversight Committee approved the Checklist of evaluation criteria for courses to be included in the MnTC at the 9/8/05 meeting. Once self review is accomplished it will provide information for faculty discussion of guidelines. We need to develop a framework for what discussion of general education would be this year. Budget requests would need to be submitted by February, 2006 to be considered with other requests for the FY07 System Budget. A workgroup composed of a subcommittee of the Transfer Oversight Committee including 2 MSCF appointed by Larry Oveson; 2 IFO appointed by Nancy Black; 1 Transfer Specialist; one administrator (Joan Costello because of her history with the MnTC) could propose a framework for general education discussions and bring it back to this committee January 20, 2006. The workgroup could also review the timeline. The workgroup should try to meet in November or December. If IFO members want to serve, they should let Nancy know. Add an item to develop process for review of guidelines for MnTC to the timeline. We need to present all documents for Meet and Confer.

Plan for self review. Suggestions were made for the timeline. State Universities are done on May 10, therefore we need to move request to CAOs to April. Curriculum committees need to put the self review on their agenda and develop a process for review of guidelines. Staff plans a session on MNTC at the CAO, CSAO, deans meeting October 26-28, 2005. The group discussed the sequence of general education discussion, guideline review and self review of courses included in MNTC. Some thought we were going to ask for self-review against existing guidelines and checklist and then figure out what to do with review of the guidelines. We need a basis on how we conduct review, so institutions can say they do or don’t meet goals or guidelines. It is possible to do all three concurrently. The timeline can be adjusted. We need a rationale for the order. Do we want to define general education? The conversations of general education should be focused on what the nature of general education should be and its relationship to MnTC. The Checklist requires agreeing on campus for definition of general education for self review. HLC says an institution’s definition of general education must be consistent with mission of institution. The workgroup should present a version of plan. The plan and attachments (guidelines and competencies) should stay together in one unit; subcommittee could handle plan to make sure faculty based; bring it ready for next meeting.

Research: Louise presented a summary of her research on General Education in other States

Recommendations:

Prepare cover letter for Checklist of Evaluation Criteria for Courses to be included in the MN Transfer Curriculum. Steve Whipple will prepare a draft, send it to Brian Donovan for feedback and then to JoAnn Simser to send to the Transfer Oversight Committee for review.
Transfer Oversight Committee Workgroup to conduct the following activities:
a. Develop framework for system discussions on general education to occur in FY07including processes to engage faculty in series of conversations, expected outcomes, facilitation, role of CTL and costs; request funding for initiative.

Minnesota State Colleges and Universities Transfer Oversight Committee Meeting Notes 10:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m., Friday, October 21. 2005 Wells Fargo Place, Conference Room 306B, St. Paul, MN

Minnesota State Colleges and Universities
Transfer Oversight Committee Meeting Notes
10:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m., Friday, October 21. 2005
Wells Fargo Place, Conference Room 306B, St. Paul, MN