Joshua Ramirez, the newly elected Academic Senate president who will take the lead May 19, shared data in order to further develop the senate’s teaching and learning committee (TLC) on Wednesday, April 10.
This committee holds a goal of supporting “faculties innovative, effective, individual instructional and educational support goals and practices,” as stated on City College’s website. Some goals the committee has in mind are creating more online and hybrid classes and designing more educational courses. Ramirez shared data from 31 other community colleges that have a formalized certification process. It was shown in order to give the board an inside look at what other campuses do with their certification process. The data looked over the amount of hours faculty engaged in with certification, how much each college looked at faculty experience with teaching classes online, and more.
“Every student that we move forward with, as far as our funding is concerned, is considered a success,” Ramirez said.
With further discussion, the in- person Senate meeting will be held on April 17 from 3:30 p.m. to 5 p.m. in order to allow faculty to have a conversation revolving around the budget challenges City College has been facing.
“We are just trying to surface a lot of different ideas, so it’s going to be an important opportunity to talk,” Kimberly Monda said, who is the current president of the board.
Monda encouraged those in the room to over enroll their classes, meaning to enroll more students than their maximum capacity is supposed to be for a class. She wants faculty to do this so that the school can increase their productivity numbers-related to the cost of instruction which are currently too low. Productivity is related to the cost of instruction.
Cornelia Alsheimer-Barthel, an accounting professor at City College, added to the discussion highlighting that the meeting held on April 17 is extremely important and that the discussions being held are most likely not easy.
“Please come and please encourage everybody to join,” Cornelia stated.
The partner resources team had a previous visit that Erika Endrijonas sent out an email about on April 1. In the email it was revealed that the second visit from the team will be held on April 17. More information in regards to this will be discussed at the next College Planning Council meeting on April 16.
“The purpose of this is to rebuild our planning and resource allocation processes through program review,” Monda said. “But also our practices for participatory governance.”
Dean Nevins, the executive director of information technology at City College, spoke at the meeting on behalf of the executive committee to share why they decided to not agree with spending $5,000 from the grant fund to pay for an app called SBCC Mobile. The reasons Nevins listed off for not continuing the app included the app being intended as a test run.
“The app was never meant to go into production and it won’t go into production,” Nevins said.
Another part of the issue is that there are two City College apps for download, the one that would be kept is called mysbcc. Lastly, there was no budget to sustain the app going forward, according to Nevins. The senate will discuss this further in later meetings.
For upcoming meetings many topics are up for discussion such as dual enrollment, the educational visual plan, and the long range facilities master plan.
The group’s next meeting will be held from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Wednesday, April 24.
Correction: April 15, 2024
A previous version of this story misspelled newly elected Academic Senate President Joshua Ramirez’s name with the incorrect last name “Ramierz.” The Channels regrets this error.
