MINUTES OF THE MEETING PAGE

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OF THE FACULTY SENATE FEBRUARY 10, 2016

was concern that this might be somewhat confusing. If people wish to revisit it however UFAC is certainly able to go back and revisit it.

Dr. Sridhar stated that the idea is eventually to get to a point where we can responsibly share all of the data. It is just a matter of how we are doing this starting now and we are just starting with this. He added that he doesn’t think this is the end. We will work on how it can be done.

Senator Beth Ekelman commented that she is on UFAC and that was one of their concerns – we are the first in the State of Ohio to do this type of data-sharing. UFAC was not comfortable with sharing all of the data right away; we thought this was a start. And as Dr. Robichaud mentioned, this is a process and we can always add if faculty decide to do that but right now two different scales was a really big issue and if you’ve look at all of the data, the way it was presented to us – we had samples of what students would see with all of the data or would they see only these two questions? It was data overload and I think it just was too much and I think if they are going and really looking at class by class instructors, they are going to have too much data and they may misinterpret it so we thought we would start out on the cautious side.”

SGA President Emily Halasah commented that actually Case Western Reserve University shares all of their data and they do summarize it and they do share the entire data-sets. Dr. Ekelman stated that in cases of private institutions, there are no other public institutions in the State of Ohio that share data.

President Berkman noted that the Law School has for years shared all of the data, all of the questions to all of the students in the Law School without ramifications. He does feel that again, there is going to be an issue. The Board of Trustees is very sensitive about this issue. And, he personally doesn’t know how to answer the question. “Why would you only allow students to see two responses of the thirteen questions? Now, one of the things I thought was suggested is that you could have some summary that you could initially show the student but if the student wanted to see an entire evaluation set for that class that they ought to have the right to see it. I don’t even know with their public records how we would explain how we are blocking the students’ access to data that is publicly collected in a public institution?”

Senator Fred Smith did not think the issue as the UFAC has presented it is denying access. It is providing useful information in an efficient way. If a student looked at something and then wanted more detail and could click on a button and then see the detail that sounds fine. But, presenting all of the information at once, as Dr. Ekelman said, probably no one wants to see it. So, making it available, like there is something wrong with making it available, what we don’t know yet, and he thinks that Professor Robichaud was unable, what she didn’t know at Steering, is exactly how information would be accessed, that is, what you would see like when you see it course by course, section by section. Would you go to some place and find an Excel spreadsheet with all the information for every course in the university? So, depending on how or what your first encounter with the data is, that probably influences how much is presented at once.