Weren't there rumors back in January that the Kenbot was talking over continuing education?  Did he do that just to dismantle it?

As long as I'm ranting, why the heck did it have to be done in the middle of the semester? Wouldn't it have made more sense to wait until May?
Unless some people think they won't be here in May . . .

That may be true in Hattiesburg but in Gulf Park we have customer service specialists for every important discipline.  There is certainly a big staff build up there.

Another example of how Lisa Slay-Mader is out of touch and simply out of it.

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Originally posted by: ree
"Do they really think that this will help with SACS?"

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Why not? iTech is a support service & the registrar's office is student services. Neither of those areas were questioned for lack of assessment under the SACS probation. But continuing education/distance learning was specifically mentioned. What better way to eliminate an accreditation issue than to eliminate the department?

Something tells me, though, that the party line (which will appear as soon as some gnomoid read this) is going to be that continuing education had served its purpose & was an anachronism, that the change will streamline operations & save lots of money. We can probably predict the amount of the "savings"...

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Originally posted by: Invictus
" Why not? iTech is a support service & the registrar's office is student services. Neither of those areas were questioned for lack of assessment under the SACS probation. But continuing education/distance learning was specifically mentioned. What better way to eliminate an accreditation issue than to eliminate the department? Something tells me, though, that the party line (which will appear as soon as some gnomoid read this) is going to be that continuing education had served its purpose & was an anachronism, that the change will streamline operations & save lots of money. We can probably predict the amount of the "savings"... "

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Invictus is right -- this is bs. In fact, without CE or some form of it many services we have been able to provide will simply bite the dust.

We have protested that many of the camps, festivals, and events that have been organized and run through departments but supported by CE would be difficult to impossible. We have been told that Malone is "considering" how to handle this.

Sure.

 

This is another case of administrators eliminating centers of activity that have accumulated skills for running a specific part of the university. Whatever structure Malone comes up with to handle distance learning will not be as efficient as what we have now. The product will be poor and the very product they are trying to promote, distance learning, will fail. Malone style, they will cut corners or cut out activities that are important for providing the service and perhaps run afoul of SACS on more issues. A mark of incompetence is never learning from your bad decisions. Often this trait is common to arrogant people who believe that previous bad outcomes were bad luck or the result of others being so stupid as so not see how brilliant their decisions are.

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Originally posted by: Mitch
"I think that the posters are not considering the flip side of the argument here. Specifically, that DEGREE courses that were offered in part or whole "on-line" were not under the umbrella of the academic units."

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Sir:

You miss the obvious. An academic change was made witn no consultation with the faculty and no advance notice. Ask your dean who I am sure can bring you up to snuff on this.

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Originally posted by: Oblivious
" Sir: You miss the obvious. An academic change was made witn no consultation with the faculty and no advance notice. Ask your dean who I am sure can bring you up to snuff on this."

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Sir:

LOL. Maybe I'll do that, talk to my dean.   

There have been many discussions with faculty and chairs who would be affected, at least in my college. Believe me, this is among the least of our problems in my college. This has been committeed to death (most of us are committeed to death with SACS and other issues), and this change hasn't been a real big secret (but you seem to be out of the loop). I am a bit concerned about how the logistics will work out (as is Stephen), but this is not the biggie you make it out to be. Sorry.   

One again, USM faculty have been Thamesmotized!

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Originally posted by: stephen judd
"   Mitch -- I see your point. But I know that not all departments feel quite the same about this. We learned of this for the first time last week in our college council of chairs. One department chair who has nearly 1200 students on distance learning programs and is running short of teaching bodies wondered aloud what provisions had been made to help the department  support the courses. And what discussions had been had and what decisions had been made concerning how the money to teach these courses would be channelled to the programs. The answer was that there isn' t an answer yet. And that was just the beginning of the crescendo of initiatives undertaken that do not have answers yet. Hello!  -- have these people heard of pre-planning? Do they understand at all what a morale killer it is to be told to act without answers when there have already been too many mistakes to count that have meant too much wasted money and too much wasted faculty and staff time? I have heard that there "may" be "some" continued support for non-credit programs. But that support has not exactly been ringlingly endorsed from my point of view. What I know is that every chnage that I have seen has translated into more work for my faculty and staff-- and that work has not been productive work that translated into the classroom or into research but in fact has been to pile more work formerly done elsewhere on the unit. I'm rapidly reaching a very bitter point right now. I've been an interim director for less than seven months and I threw the book of my predessor out three months ago.I feel as though I can count on nothing to work as it did one year ago. I can;t even pick up the phone and talk to the same people he talked to . . . most of them are gone. I know a wreck when I see one.  "

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Stephen:

I understand. I was just saying today that it seems so much is happening that it's tough to keep up, and that the changes and obligations and tasks can be overwhelming and exhausting. I am afraid sometimes to look up from my desk because someone (faculty, student, staff, administrator) will hand me something that needs to be done yesterday. And the person that handled it last week is in a different office or position or gone. I've been here nine years, and (talk about traditions) the most longstanding one we have here is a failure to fully plan (e.g., the forced merger of counseling and psychology under Lucas; the launch of Peoplesoft under Horace; the implementation of "distance learning" without sufficient resouces or planning; having to go to three different offices for tech support or a simple e-mail account when I got here). We just have not had that sort of culture here, one that puts a premium on planning and gets information to ALL the people that need the information. With the CE issue, my guess is that this is less about curriculum then about how our work will be supported. It is my understanding that credit and control for degree program offerings formerly under CE will revert to the colleges. This will involve some irritating changes in our processes for us paper pushers, but I am a fan of having control of, and credit for, degree program offerings in my college (but, I am not looking forward to the transition period).       

In the 70's and maybe early 80's CE was given an approtiation by the state of approximately 500,000 per year. A decision was made to make it self funded. (whether by the IHL or the then current president I can't remember) The fact is CE was allowed to offer (including coffee and doughnuts) enrollment to students for credit courses. This replaced the state funding over a period of years and thus made them self funded! No mention of SACS accreditation was ever mentioned or considered.(as far as I recall) The formula for tuition distribution was as follows: if a student was over the tuition plateau then CE got the full tuition dollars for the course they offered, if they weren't over the plateau they got the full tuition generated. The campus received the rest ( short changed). This was and still might be true for GP. Thus the campus subsidized CE and GP by taking a reduction of tuition dollars. It seems that the current dilema has evolved to the point that the "money" and credit hours generated has become noticeable to SACS, thus the rearrangement of the programs credit hour production and tuition back to the appropriate colleges. The question now is " Who will pay for the CICE buiding that was financed by these monies?" I don't think the colleges will benefit for quite a while!

A simple check of the budget for the years mentioned will support these statements.

I stand by what I posted earlier. I disagree with Mitch that the impact of this will be minimal. First, it is already apparent from posters that it will affect different departments and areas in varying ways. Just because it does not affect one discipline does not mean it is benign. I am sure if it were going to dump a lot more duties on Mitch's overloaded desk, he would not be so cavalier about this change. If the information is correct that Malone was trying to figure out how to handle problems after the fact rather than planning for the contingencies, it will turn out to be another FUBAR decision. As with all of these top-down mandates, the unintended consequences are far greater than any imagined benefit. A flat learning curve is a prerequisite for being a top administrator in this regime.

Another person problems are always much less important than our own. If it affects Liberal Arts, then who cares, I am not in Liberal Arts. Again, loyal productive faculty members and employees get hosed without warning and the onlookers say, “gee that is too bad but it is not bothering me so who cares.

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Originally posted by: LVN
"Please correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I know credit hour production has always gone to the departments. What I do know for sure is that when Independent Study was handled manually, its credit hour production went nowhere. When the courses were moved to PeopleSoft, the credit hour production then began to accrue to the departments. As far as I know, Mitch, this did not involve any courses in ed or psych. I know that PeopleSoft was a boondoggle in some ways, but you have to remember that BULL (which I had very little experience with) was a legacy system, inadequate and undocumented, and it was failing fast. Unfortunately, PeopleSoft was never designed for educational uses, and a lot of what we got was fairly jury-rigged. CE, and IS in particular, got totally left out of the planning, and it was a mess getting us into the system. BUT, I also understand that there was really no program out there that was any better than PS, and the system UM installed was as bad or worse. When you talk about CE, you're actually talking about several different types of courses and modes of delivery. I do not see how in the WORLD your departments are going to be able to pick up this workload. "

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LVN-

EPY has had many online offerings over the years. Some faculty teach almost all courses online. But see the post by historian for the money issues. I agree that BULL was on its last legs, but that goes to my point of lack of planning and the need to hustle in a new system with few degrees of freedom (remember that PPS couldn't do payroll for 9 months when we got it!--it was programmed for 12 only). I understand (somewhat) about the complexities involved and the shift in workload, and that is what concerns me (as I said before). But many other universities are structured this way. And setting up a degree course for the first time through CE wasn't all that easy. My phone calls weren't always returned, it was tough to figure out who was in charge of what, and my students had a hard time getting registered. It was sorted out in the end, but my confidence in the system wasn't all that great after that experience. I'm sure others have had a smoother experience, but my point is that it was far from perfect.