CAA to revise communications course

Cassie Buchman, Administration Editor

The Council on Academic Affairs will be revising a communication studies course at its meeting Tuesday in Booth Library.

This will be the first CAA meeting of the fall 2015 semester.

Marita Gronnvoll, a communications studies professor and this year’s chair of CAA, said this week the members only have one item to act on, which is a course revision.

“The revision was completed last spring,” Gronnvoll said.

The revision is for CMN 3660: Communication and Conflict Management, which will now be offered online.

The change had to go through the communication studies department, then the College of Arts and Humanities, then CAA.

Many of the course revisions CAA has seen are when professors want to offer an technological aspect to their classes.

“A lot of courses have been revised to being offered online in addition to being taught in the classroom,” Gronnvoll said. “In the last year, departments have been that kind of adjustment.”

Gronnvoll said the reason for so many classes going online is because that is what the new trend is.

“The demand is for a section or a whole course to involve online content,” she said.

When CAA votes on adding new courses or revising old ones, they go over conflicts people may have with these decisions.

“We sometimes have someone from the department to talk about what is being proposed,” Gronnvoll said. “If anyone on CAA has questions, they answer them.”

Beth Gill, a professor in the communication studies department, will be talking about revising CMN 3660.

“She is not a member of CAA, she is just visiting to represent the course,” Gronnvoll said.

Gronnvoll said this will happen about a half hour into the meeting.

Gronnvoll said that although CAA had a pretty light agenda this week, some weeks they go through as many as 25 items.

“We act on each one,” Gronnvoll said. “Some meetings are less than 15 minutes long, some take at least an hour.”

This is why two hours are scheduled for CAA meetings.

“If it is a very heavy agenda, sometimes we might use all two hours,” Gronnvoll said.

CAA will also go over an email from the University Advancement requesting an appointment for the University Naming Committee for the 2016-16 academic year.

CAA members are often asked to be members of other committees.

Discussion items include the status of the General Education Committee and the status of the course proposal form revisions.

They will also orient new CAA members to how meetings work and what CAA does.

“We sill stress the important of attendance, since if we don’t have quorum, we can’t do anything,” Gronnvoll said.

Quorum is the amount of members needed to be present at a meeting to make the meeting valid.

CAA needs eight voting members present to make quorum.

The council meets at 2 p.m. in Room 4440 Tuesday at Booth Library.

 

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