Constituent Input Subcommittee Meeting Minutes

Monday 4-3-06, Thornton

Present: Haipeng Li, Albert Borroni, Jessica Grim, Shozo Kawaguchi, Scott Saluga.

Scott gave a report on his assignments: he talked with his students and it looks like he found one who can serve on our committee starting next Monday. Her name is Ami Vice, a Con artist diploma student. Shozo reminded us that it would be a good idea to contact the Student Senate and suggested that Ray talk to the Student Senate and recommend Ami to serve on our committee. Haipeng will talk to Ray about this.
Scott also sent out a request to the schools about survey questions but had not heard back from any. He sent out another plea this morning and hoped to hear back from them soon.

Albert is creating a space for our committee on Blackboard (as we speak!). He also had not heard back from the lists he sent requests to on survey questions.

Jessica announced that the Planning Committee will be meeting at 2:30 pm today (right after our meeting!).

Haipeng had distributed two draft documents before the meeting and hope to have focused discussions on them.

The first one is a document that includes ideas of what we want, summaries from information on Scott Bennett’s website, specifically from Current Projects page, his survey questions to both students and faculty, and some ideas on the next steps.

We thought it would be a good idea to spend some time on the section on “what we want” and then on the survey questions. We had a good discussion there and decided that Scott’s student survey would be more appropriate for our use and we will design our own faculty survey questions. For the student survey, we felt that about half of the questions were relevant for us and decided to go with them, on topics of “active and collaborative learning” and “student faculty collaboration.” Shozo suggested that we might want to include a section on “how to seek information.”

Jessica and Haipeng agreed to work on the questions and try to finish them this week. We hope to finalize them at next Monday’s meeting and have the survey ready next week.

The other document Haipeng had distributed earlier was a summary of one of the readings which describes specific steps for conducting focus group sessions. The format the article suggests sounds fine but we will need to come up with some questions to use. Shozo reminded us that communicating with students about the survey and focus groups is important and he will think more about what the best ways are to publicize these events.

Minutes by Haipeng Li