CAA to vote on adding online elements to course

Cassie Buchman, Administration Editor

The Council on Academic Affairs will vote on revising MIS 4850 Systems Security to add an online component to the course at their meeting 2 p.m. Tuesday in room 4440 of Booth Library.

MIS is the Management Information Systems major.

Marita Gronnvoll, chair of the CAA, said the course would be updated to allow sections to be taught in hybrid or online venues.

“It doesn’t look like they’re making any changes in content,” Gronnvoll said. “They are offering it both face and face and online, giving them an oppurtunity to do either.”

Kurt Olausen, the director of the study abroad, will also come to talk to the council about study abroad courses and the approval process for the courses.

In 2012 the CAA requested the study abroad office to send them the report of new classes that had been approved for the study abroad program.

Gronnvoll said they did that instead of making them run the curriculum through the CAA like everyone else does.

“It really slows the process down,” Gronnvoll said. “It’s already a really laborious process and study abroad is already really paperwork heavy.”

The CAA wanted to make sure the study abroad courses were meeting the undergraduate learning goals and there were enough credit hours.

After everyone in the study abroad office was turned over, the CAA did not get the report.

“It’s nobody’s fault, it’s just that there’s been a turnover of staff and faculty, so no one was aware of (the report),” Gronnvoll said. “Dr. Olausen didn’t even know about it.”

Gronnvoll said she has never led a study abroad program, but she knows that it is really a job to put one together.

“There’s turnover and certain information just slips through the cracks,” Gronvoll said. “I think that’s all it was.

Olausen will want to know what kind of information the CAA wants in the report and what they would like to see and explain how the process goes as well as getting information from the CAA, Gronnvoll said.

Gronnvoll emailed Olausen and told him about the report and asked him to come to the meeting.

“He’s going to find out what we want as far as what CAA would like to see in this report and then how we can go about implementing this,” Gronnvoll said. “So it’s just going to be a conversation just to let him know some of the history.”

Gronnvoll said this will be helpful for her as well as she was not involved in the original request for a report.

She said she did not know why there was such a large turnover rate in study abroad.

“It’s weird, it just happens sometimes that you can be in a place where there’s no turnover at all then all of a sudden everyone turns over,” Gronnvoll said. “I think it’s one of those things that happens all of a sudden in one place, like lightning strikes.”

In some cases, the courses for the study abroad program are different than regular classes.

“In our department, we tend to have the same course that’s for study abroad, but then there’s different types of study abroad,” Gronnvoll said.

One of these is called an “excursion,” where more time is spent in the study abroad than in the classroom.

Another one is where Eastern will partner with universities where they have class time in the other office as well time in the field.

 

Cassie Buchman can be reached at 581-2812 or [email protected]