It's been a year and a day, so an update is needed (I hate dead pages, so sad)

Let me update a few things that have gone on since last 12/10.  

First, we saw the full extent of the 2017 budget and ended up with over a $6 million loss in revenue rather than a $5 million loss in revenue.  The difference was made up with "reserves."  

Next, we found out in the spring that those items marked "university initiatives" continue to be funded regardless of the budget situation.  Even while faculty positions are being cut and class sizes are being pumped up by 30% or more.  "University Initiatives" are those things that were listed above the priority line when they were brought to the Planning and Budgeting Committee over the years, so they weren't considered for voting.  They just "were."  Very Zen.

Since the spring we've had no FY18 budget updates in PBC, just enrollment updates.  Yes, you read that right.  Even though numbers have been closed out and handed on to the Board of Regents, the UHCL Shared Governance system hasn't even really updated anything but our revenue forecast (based on Fall 2017 numbers).  Even better: the numbers for the 6% reduction expected for FY19 (next year) and the 3% reduction for FY20 for academic units came out of thin air.  Those numbers were picked simply to spread the remaining deficit over three years.

Thankfully, we've had the Ruffalo-Noel-Levitz academic consulting firm on campus several times to set us on the straight and narrow one analyst at a time.  Unfortunately, nobody's really sure how much this relationship costs.

Meanwhile, I've been in several different meetings where I got to hear about how the support units had so.many.cuts last year.  I'm pretty sure that the support units are what accountants call "cost centers" and the academic units are what accountants call "profit centers."  Given the current overhead profile at UHCL the "cost centers" have a long way to go before we hit bottom, but the folks in charge don't see it that way.

MBA enrollment for FA17 was up about 60% from last fall.  However, due to our new 8-week classes it appears that we're running those folks off as fast as we can.  Some math:

• ONLINE CLASS < > EASY
• 8-WEEK CLASS < > EASY

In fact, 

•  HARD(8-week) > HARD(15-week);  HARD is fn (time; reasons)

• HARD(ONLINE) > HARD(F2F);  HARD is fn (time; reasons; 10,000 years human practice and conditioning)

This will come as news to some of our new grad students, I think.  The same thing has happened in the summer for the last 10 years.  The intersection of the 9-week bubble and the online bubble is the spot.  

Sorry folks, the moose out front shoulda told ya.

More retirements have been announced:  the interim CFO and her husband the head of computing are leaving in the spring.

On a happier note, our new Prez Dr. Ira K. Blake, formerly of Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, the Huskies, has made a big impression on our external constituency since she arrived on campus in August, and most folks are convinced that she's here to help.  Unless she's willing to start cutting back staff, and quickly, I'm not sure what will help.  Looking at the numbers, there's no way we can grow our way out of our issues.  Certainly not if we keep growing in the direction we've been growing for the past 10 years. 

We found out today that the university will be creating yet another AVP position, this one for marketing and communications, and a Director slot under that one too.  Taking marketing out of Enrollment Management is a step in the right direction, but unless there's a big pot of money someplace, and unless the AVP gets up to speed fast, there may not be anything left to market.

 

A couple more things:

In meetings I hear the question "What is the faculty going to do?"  The proper question is "What ELSE is the faculty going to do?"  In the last two years we have changed the MBA curriculum by shortening it to 39 hours without prereqs or foundation courses, eliminated the GMAT requirement, and gone to an 8-week format because we were told that was "all we could do."  The year before that the MS Finance group revised the MS curriculum to support the eventual MBA change and take 6 hours out of the 36-hour curriculum, eliminate prereqs and foundation classes, and drop the GMAT requirement so that most students won't need to take it.  We continue to struggle to implement and tweak an 8-week format with both online and hybrid classes, again, to support our MBA concentration (which also had to be rebuilt) and the general MBA.  All of this is ongoing, and the demands on the faculty and students are much different in an 8-week session.  So again, the question should be "What ELSE can the faculty do?"

Some solutions to the issues that keep coming up (from various deans around the university).  I think it's imperative that we get some idea of the university's long-term plans before we commit to any of these proposed solutions and fix the FY18 budget shortfall:

• Faculty will need to teach bigger classes.  The average on campus, it seems, is 16 students.  That seems kinda small for MBA classes since about 2007 or so.  And, let me add "again."
• Faculty will need to teach a 4-4 load, even though the handbook says we teach a 3-3 load due to service and research expectations.  I don't know about the other colleges, but the business college would lose accreditation in this case, but at least it would lower research expectations - we don't have time to work on research anyway.  If we aren't accredited as a BUS school, we'll need a lot fewer staff and/or admin types around.
• Faculty will have to come up with new masters programs that are timely and up-to-date and popular.  Read as:  easy, cheap and short.  And, let me just say "again."
• If we can't get our act together we might just have to become part of UH Central Campus.  Yes, but they have a real faculty senate who might just stick up to administration once in a while.  I think they probably have a real HR department and maybe a real computing group, too.
• We might have to lose some salary.  Yes, but if you cut my salary you better be prepared to start cutting everyone else's too.
• We might have to have layoffs of faculty who aren't tenured.  Yep, that could happen.  That's what tenure is for.  Well, that plus academic standards.  Without tenure there wouldn't be any standards really.  Not these days.
• Unless BUS and the MBA program decides to work with Academic Partnerships or some other diploma mill all Hell will break lose and it will be the BUS faculty's fault.  How dare we not fund all of those staff positions just so we can have fewer than 70 students in a class?  That's so selfish of us.  After all, the whole bigger classes and online thing has worked out so well for us up to this point.  Plus, never mind the reputation damage to all of our prior grads.  We need to work with really big classes so some of the student services folks' assistants can get assistants of their very own.  Best reason yet!

Losing our president, provost, a couple of deans and now the CFO

Greetings!

It's time for an update I guess.  Last year we learned that Dr. Carl Stockton, Senior Vice President and Provost, was leaving to be president at an Auburn branch campus.  He was gone in July.  Then in September we learned that Dr. William A. Staples, President, was leaving as of August 2017.  The business dean announced his retirement on the same date at about the same time.  Then the dean of the College of Science and Computer Engineering announced that he was going to leave (right after securing a mechanical engineering degree program for our new building, to his credit).

On Friday, it was announced that Michelle Dotter, VP of Finance and Number Three honcho at UHCL will retire in February.  Having worked with Michelle in my time as chair of the university's Planning and Budgeting Committee, I can say that this place will miss her very much.  There have been times when she held the budget together through sheer force of will.  I hate to give any academic administrator credit, but in her case she doesn't come from the ranks of academia and it was pretty obvious.  She has certainly earned her retirement if anyone ever has.

The provost search has been put on hold while we find a president, but the search for the business dean and the president are going ahead full steam.  It will be interesting to see what happens.

How to write better assignments (and learn more, too)

I'm sharing a link today entitled "How Students Can Write Better Assignments" from UnknownProfessor on the blog "Financial Rounds".  It's a couple of years old, almost, but I don't think these types of things really go out of date.

Enjoy.

"UnknownProfessor" cites his inspiration as "The Unknown Comic" from The Gong Show.  Here's a sample of that guy's work.

Hey, students: Prereqs matter! Don't leave home without them...

In grading my summer course midterms, I'm starting to again see how prereqs make the difference.  In my financial policy class, for example, I can determine who has taken the prerequisite course and who isn't by simply looking at the midterm scores.  One person obviously got credit for taking an undergrad class many years ago, so they had no clue about some of the material and how it fit together.  Several other students came straight from a STEM background and have no clue how accounting and econ and finance work.  Even though they may know their fields, they aren't prepared to cultivate an understanding of financial economics at the firm level without a lot of remediation on their part.  In financial statements analysis the undergrads are better prepared in many ways because they at least know what they don't know (and have one Intermediate Accounting under their belts).

Unfortunately, this isn't a new trend, and summer course grade distributions just seem to get worse and worse each year.  Ultimately the burden lies with the student, and those who are willing to prepare reap the benefits every time.  Summer is tough enough as it is.

The Great Sell Out: Faculty leadership at UHCL continues to sell out by the numbers, enabling abusive administrators

Sunlight is the best disinfectant, so here we go...

[Note: This was written back in the Spring of 2015, and little has changed just because it's summer.]

Last semester [Fall 2014] saw the latest salvo in a growing trend at Bayou U. - the faculty senate leadership threatened several times to "end run" faculty on governance committees in order to get some changes that they wanted.  Or, rather, that the university administrators wanted.  For the first time in a long time, Faculty Senate Executive Committee (FSEC) has started setting the agenda by siding with administrators without even really trying to conceal it, without any shame.  They're now working proactively to undermine legitimate faculty concerns.

I guess we should have seen it coming.  Last spring in Faculty Assembly we saw a faculty climate survey where the faculty leadership swept all of the free-form comments received under the rug.  It was done to "protect anonymity."  Sure.  So... once again nothing controversial came out of it - we got some generalities back from the folks who did the analysis.  The most important thing was that nothing shocking came out of it.  All of the faculty here are happy and in line ... and the exceptional faculty who keep leaving were really happy here, too...

We're FSEC, let's make up university policy as we go!

Last year in senate we had two members of faculty leadership completely do an end-run around a senate committee on faculty workload policy, to the extent that their version had already been shopped around for administrative approval before bringing it to senate as an alternative to the committee's document that represented months of effort.  Go back and read that again if it isn't clear.

It's tough to sell out pre-emptively, but I think that's what we're looking at there. A reactionary sell-out.  Finally an "ad hoc" committee was created in order to solicit input on the workload issue, which nobody really thought needed major changes in the first place (except administrators).  (Flashback:  We got an "ad hoc" committee on proctoring in order to kill that issue at the university level, starting in summer of 2011 - that led to the School of Business confrontation that I outlined here last spring.  That university-level committee has not produced any results as of Feb. 2015, and it remains bogged down with legal questions that School of Business answered for itself and its students in December of 2013.)

In Fall 2014 a similar "end run" was tried regarding a proposed accessibility policy - the threat was that a different committee would get to look at it if the university Curriculum and Teaching committee (C and T) didn't pass it, or that a whole new committee would be created in order to review such things.  See, there are folks on the Curriculum and Teaching committee (myself included) who actually read things and think through the consequences of passing new and unnecessary regulations.  We actually read the proposals put before us and consider whether all constituencies have been consulted appropriately.  

For example, when a School of Education counseling undergraduate program was proposed the committee had concerns about demand and whether the counseling faculty had worked closely with the psychology faculty in HSH in order to make sure that there wouldn't be damage to other programs.  Then we heard that this was different from psychological counseling - it was DRUG counseling, and HSH didn't have any programs like that.  There still was no demand for the program described, other than some vagaries.  We asked, again, for details of the analysis that was done in the School of Education in support of this proposal and we were told to pound sand - basically, the proposing faculty member said that since the coordinating board didn't require such things the committee couldn't ask for it either.  After the SoE faculty on the committee and other members got bullied enough in-house we eventually sent it up to senate, but before C and T voted on it there was talk of passing it off to "some other committee."  Well, in UHCL's shared governance system there is only ONE committee that looks at new programs and minor proposals, etc.  That would be C and T.  Creating another committee, although it's become the norm for this senate leadership to circumvent the system, would still be "highly irregular" in shared governance terms.  .  

When the shared governance system was revised in 2006 (I was there) the administration at the time conspired to stack all of the shared governance committees with administrators and their direct reports.  Consequently, faculty are terribly outnumbered on every shared governance committee, except one.  That one is C and T, the single arm of the senate that gets to review everything that could deal with 1) curriculum, or 2) teaching, prior to passing it to a senate vote. Because of this we have to consider all of the ramifications of a particular action, not just those that impact us personally (although in the accessibility instance my main problems were with the online QA procedure and how it has been and will be applied by non-faculty evaluators).  When C and T had questions about a re-do of the university's online course policy, the one that passed University Council on Valentine's Day 2013, a separate "ad hoc" committee was formed for that one (online courses), too, and then a special committee was formed for the accessibility policy, separately.  Both were really created in order to make sure that one or the other ended up bullying online faculty through the QA policy and the online programs office.  After all, if they can bully online faculty enough then those courses might end up being designed to be easier than other classes at the university.

What now?

The latest "thing" is that FSEC has taken upon itself, without any prompting from anyone else (in faculty, that is) to ask whether we need to redesign the Faculty Senate Constitution, again.  It was last done in 2006, along with the rest of UHCL Shared Governance, and the resulting structure, unfortunately, still means that questions of academic importance (curriculum, teaching, admissions policy, class sizes) have to go through senate.  That's what "shared governance" means, or at least that's what it means to accreditation agencies such as SACS, our regional accreditor.  SACS looks for UHCL to have a shared governance process where faculty rule on curriculum and teaching matters and pass that on to the full senate for a vote, and when we stop having this process it might generate some questions at the accreditation level.

We had a faculty climate survey last spring that said nothing about changing the senate constitution to reduce faculty input.  In fact, I think the concerns outlined indicated that faculty thought we should have a louder voice in governance.  We had a faculty retreat this past fall that didn't mention changing the faculty senate constitution either - if this had been enough of an issue you'd think we would have heard something about it before.  Meanwhile, the things we have heard about, such as the lack of communication between faculty and administration (or, rather, administrators' steamrolling of faculty on every little decision, such as the recent changes to parking administration) go unanswered.  The lack of accountability of FSEC to that stands out.  Instead of feathering their beds with administrative favor, they should be working to fix the huge rift between administrators and faculty at this institution.  I guess it's just easier to sell out.

Conflicts of Interest (see Wikipedia) - some really good examples

It's probably just coincidence, but it turns out that several members of our Faculty Senate Executive Committee were up for promotion to full professor this year.  And the rumor is that others plan to go up for full professor next year or the year after.  For administrators, promoting someone to full professor is a highly-subjective process, and it's no surprise that many academics never achieve that rank after long careers in the trenches.  For our faculty, promotion to full professor represents a pre-tax pay increase of $8,000 per year, and since most merit raises are based on percentages of base pay, such a promotion will have an even larger impact on future pay increases.  It's understandable that such things are important to people, but it's very hard to understand why otherwise intelligent and thoughtful people cannot foresee the problems that can follow a faculty leadership capitulation to administrative whim.

The nominal sum of $8,000 at least allows us to put a price on things.  How much was that worth?  $8,000.  Easy.

Other faculty are motivated in less-than-obvious ways.  But the motivations and levers are there nonetheless.  Perhaps someone needs university support behind a grant or two, or maybe someone's program is always vulnerable to competition from other schools or scrutiny from the coordinating board for being too small.  Those type of favors are worth something too.  Conflicts of interest and undue influence opportunities abound in academia at every level.

Incentives are Relative

I don't begrudge administrators their positions or their jobs (but they volunteered to be administrators, that's true).  They're in a tough spot.  At UHCL the top administrative concern is to increase enrollment.  To this end administrators could:  manipulate admission standards (for example, enrolling foreign graduate students who haven't really completed an undergraduate degree or sufficient English language training); force faculty to lower standards by moving programs online or increasing class sizes (often these go hand in hand, as we've found); offer increasing financial aid to marginal students without concern for their academic records (transfer scholarships); compromise the long-term reputational capital of the university's programs by limiting what faculty can use as tools in the classroom (the proctoring of online courses, for example) or tacitly encouraging academic collusion and cheating; bullying untenured faculty into making tradeoffs that are unhealthy for students and the curriculum (writing assignments in a 70-seat intro survey class, for example).

When our recent 4-year programs were put together the administration decided that the basic microecon and macroecon classes would be used for Social Science and other assessment for state-mandated learning outcomes (5 areas total).  This type of assessment would require writing (and re-writing) of assignments, when normally those courses are taught in large sections that don't use writing assignments of any type.  Over time we've moved consistently to larger sections in most undergrad econ classes, and the norm is to teach these new classes that way as well.  The econ faculty had little input (if any) to the assessment decision, and instead it was handed down from on high.  When the unit chair recently questioned the feasibility of having writing assessment in large sections (just as implementation was being coordinated), she was publicly cursed and screamed at by her boss and called "unreasonable," even though it wasn't seen as unreasonable to ask faculty to collect writing assessment in a 2000-level economics core requirement with 70 students or more.  The ones doing  all of the screaming have a conflict of interest in this matter - enrollment at any cost is the agenda, regardless of the harm that it might do to the university's standards, reputation or programs, or of the harm to student learning and outcomes.  Reasonable people acknowledge that writing is better learned in smaller classes, with lots of feedback, and that writing in econ classes of 40+ isn't to be considered reasonable.

Administrators are put in place to achieve certain things.  In this case, it's obvious that they're trying to grow programs and enrollment.  That's reasonable.  We must keep in mind, though, that they also have objectives that conflict with the long-term interests of the university.  For example, one of our current senior administrators has actively sought higher-level jobs off campus by publicizing the number of online program initiations he has presided over or caused to be created on our campus.  He's been a finalist for these positions at least twice that faculty know of, and in each case he's touted the fact that faculty re-tooled programs for online delivery while he was here.  This individual has repeatedly talked of "quality online programs" in public comments, and yet did everything possible for several years to prevent faculty from having a proctoring solution in online courses.  It wasn't until it was a problem with regulators that he was forced to back off.

Their objectives as administrators can be considered reasonable up until those objectives conflict with the mission of the university and the long-term outcomes for students.  Making changes that undermine the reputation of the university on behalf of administrative vitae is unethical, especially when those administrators have no intention of staying with the university and watching their disasters unfold.

For administrators to influence faculty leadership and trade favors and promotion to get their way should be expected.  We should plan for it.  And believe it or not the academic system HAS planned for it.  How?  Faculty have jobs to do as well.  And one of our jobs, one of the things we're responsible for, is maintaining an effective academic curriculum and effective standards.  It's expected of us by every constituency you can identify and ask.  It's our responsibility to keep control of those things that administrators would fritter away, such as admission standards, faculty-to-student ratios, class sizes, prerequisite enforcement, academic integrity enforcement.

Students and parents don't choose a university because they love and respect the administrators.  It's all about faculty (and staff - especially those folks who interact with students).  Faculty are the face of the organization, and we can make or break its image.

Just as the legislative branch of our federal government is in place with the purpose of providing checks and balances for executive power at that level, the faculty (content experts) are in place to challenge and check administrative power (bureaucratic experts) at the university level.  And the mechanism of tenure is in place to make sure that this balance happens, because administrators will always control purse strings.  Without tenure, administrators would have free reign over academic policies.  We can see this in academic situations where tenure isn't the norm.

The trouble comes, as in our case, when faculty members refuse to recognize their responsibility to academic standards.  Or, when they sell out for a few more pieces of silver.  When they decide that it's better to go along in order to get along to be comfortable.  That may be a good strategy in some cases, but here it has only led to a further winnowing of faculty legitimacy and power.  The opposition, it seems, doesn't understand what "compromise" means.  That's how they continue to co-opt faculty at every opportunity.  Given their obvious intellectual challenges we should expect bullying to be their go-to strategy.  Plus, they've got the short-term purse strings that they can bully with, too.

But faculty takes too long to get things done; faculty gets in the way of university decisions!

That's just silly.  Faculty didn't stop the recent Downward Expansion program, and it's considered a rousing success (but it will be expensive in the long term).  Faculty didn't stand in the way of the several Bachelor of Applied Sciences "completer" programs begun in the last few years (IT, healthcare, criminal justice, to name a few).  Faculty input didn't get in the way of the Nursing program, which was pushed through and set up in Pearland virtually overnight and with little faculty discussion or questions. [Edit:  And has turned out to be a disaster.] Faculty senate committees have completed work on the PsyD program, the BAS programs and reviewed accessibility policy and Quality Assurance policy (online courses) several times and provided crucial input.  To say that the current senate structure is flawed is simply naive.

When budget cuts loomed over Texas universities a few years ago, the shared governance process received and reviewed dozens and dozens of public comments (mostly anonymous) about how to cut costs in the university in the most efficient manner.  This dialog kept things from getting out of hand and reassured everyone that layoffs would be an absolute "last resort."

Faculty hasn't had any input into the marketing of the university, or the space allocation of the university in years - so no one can say that faculty held anything up.  Faculty certainly didn't stand in the way of the recent parking system "upgrade" at the university, nor did we get in the way of HEAF funds being used to build a building for Bayou 5-0 (complete with their very own holding cell, sauna and weight room (ok, I made the sauna part up)).  Heck, we didn't even give anyone a vote of "no confidence" for cutting faculty out of those decisions hook, line and sinker.

How can anyone argue that faculty are a hindrance to governance when we haven't even impeached or voted "no confidence" on anyone yet?  Insanity.  Given what we've had to put up with thus far, I think things have been quite tame.  I guess that demonstrates the efficacy of the tame approach.

UHCL School of Business is reaffirmed by AACSB

I neglected to mention, last month, that we had been notified by Dean Cummings that AACSB has closed out our conditional status.  We've been reaffirmed.  The press release here clears things up a bit:

"AACSB Accreditation is the hallmark of excellence in business and accounting education, and has been earned by less than 5 percent of the world’s business programs. Today, there are 727 business schools in 48 countries and territories that have earned AACSB Accreditation. Similarly, 182 institutions hold an additional specialized AACSB Accreditation for their accounting programs.

 “It takes a great deal of commitment and determination to earn and maintain AACSB Accreditation,” said Robert D. Reid, executive vice president and chief accreditation officer of AACSB International. “Business schools must not only meet specific standards of excellence, but their deans, faculty and professional staff must make a commitment to ongoing continuous improvement to ensure that the institution will continue to deliver the highest quality of education to students.”

No official paper has been distributed yet, but you can bet that after the last fiasco (ultimately involving the state attorney general's office) we'll have that in our hands as soon as it's available.

One more thing:  Our business school never lost accreditation.  I heard last week that the rumor was going around that our accreditation got pulled.  That's not true.  We were told by the accreditation body that we had some things to fix.  We fixed those things (mainly proctoring).  Now we're getting ready for the NEXT accreditation visit in 2018 by updating assurance of learning and "closing the loop."

Keywords:  accreditation, UHCL, AACSB, continuing review, proctoring

UHCL: How is Shared Governance like Jumbo Shrimp?

Well, it appears that the New Constitution is still rolling along, although now we'll get an "ad hoc committee" to review the changes and figure out how to implement it.  Once all the furor dies down, next year, this committee will recommend it to the full faculty for a vote.  

What changes does it make?  Well, for starters it adds four more senators from each of the four schools, for a total of 48 senators, which is almost a quarter of the total university faculty.  (In case your algebra bone is failing you, that means we started with 8 faculty from each school).  Then it allows for a couple of librarians, and anyone considered "full-time" and not just tenured or tenure-track folks would be eligible to serve on senate.  The only "senate-eligible" folks now are tenure or tenure-track, and one of our problems is that we have too many untenured junior faculty on senate now.  I can't imagine how expanding the group will work out...

The New Constitution rebuilds all of the senate committees, and it also divides up Curriculum and  Teaching into two committees, one for undergrad decisions and one for grad decisions, and allows the grad committee to decide who is "graduate faculty."  Administrators now sit on these two committees, presumably so they can report back to other administrators about who the troublemakers are (without the faculty lackeys having to do all of it for them).

Keep in mind that we're being sold all this because "this is how everyone else does it" - see argumentum ad populum .  We're also being told that all of the new committees will enhance communication with administration and allow faculty to regain control of things such as the calendar and the catalog.

Ultimately, the result will be a weaker voice for faculty.  More untenured folks in senate means a weaker senate, and more committees certainly won't speed things up any or take any power away from the administrators that already wield it.  Senate will have the opportunity to change senate bylaws at any time, by itself, without a vote of the faculty.  That should work out well.

How did we get to this point?  As I mentioned last month it's all about bullying and conflict of interest.  John Lennon said "Follow the money" and that's good to remember here, too, although some senate folks clearly just want to go along to get along so that the bullying of faculty by administrators will stop.  Given the history of the gang currently running the show at UHCL, it's unlikely that they have some hidden leadership talent stashed away someplace.  They've been so successful with bullying and outright intimidation thus far, why change now?

Big changes coming to shared governance at UHCL? Not likely.

Not really.  It's the same old stuff that's happened over and over before, it's just called something new this time.

Students: This will be meaningless to you because it's all inside baseball.  It might be fun to read, and if you plan to work in state government then it might be something to pay attention to.  This type of bureaucratic sinkhole comes up over and over in government agencies, and that's not likely to end anytime soon.  Petty bureaucrats get a little bit of budgeting power... same story, different day.  (Maybe if they could make the trains run on time it would all work out in the end.)

So... where do we start?  UHCL is required by SACS and other accrediting bodies to have a system of Shared Governance in which the various constituencies and stakeholder groups from within the university have a part in making decisions.  I know that sounds kind of obvious, but I state it here to remind people that functional shared governance is required by accrediting bodies.  For good reason.

Bullying, on the other hand, is frowned upon by accrediting bodies.  Especially systematic and long-term, pervasive bullying and abuse.  Those things don't work out well for anyone in the end.

The latest boondoggle at the university involves the continued co-opting of the Faculty Senate Executive Committee.  This is the group of folks at the top of the official faculty hierarchy, and they set the agenda for faculty senate meetings and other faculty events during the year.  These are the folks who chair the various shared governance committees across the university and the committees within and appointed by the senate itself.  They spend a great deal of time grinding away on this stuff every year and I've done it plenty and I don't envy them a bit.

The particular committee at the university level that reviews, investigates and passes along new programs and degrees to faculty senate is called Curriculum and Teaching.  All new programs are supposed to go before Curriculum and Teaching (CandT) and get approval before moving ahead to the vote in the Senate - that's how it was designed, I was there when it happened and that's what the documents online say.  That's the charge of the committee, and that's why it's called "Curriculum and Teaching."  Well, last semester CandT didn't like a new degree program proposal by one college at the university because it appeared to be redundant - there was another degree in a different college that already did what was being proposed (well, I might add, but that's just my opinion).  The first time we saw it we sent it back for more info, and we asked that the proposing faculty work with the existing faculty in the other school to determine what was wrong with the new plan and try to fix it.  When the proposal came back again nothing had been done, but at least both sides agreed to sit down and talk with us.  CandT shelved it again.  Why?  Because it was redundant.  Still redundant.

The sit-downs didn't really happen, and the proposing faculty just decided to ignore the requests for information and bully faculty on the committee instead.  How did they learn to do that?

Ultimately CandT sent it to senate, and the full senate failed to pass it.  It was a very poorly done proposal, and the people involved refused to answer questions and/or build consensus beforehand.  Plus, they wanted to train undergrads to do something that undergrads aren't supposed to be doing (according to the APA).

Evidently that program is finding a way to move forward without CandT.  I don't know at this point whether there's another committee that will look at it, or whether it will just go straight to senate, or if it will simply bypass the faculty altogether.  The only reason that I bring it up is that this type of thing isn't a new phenomenon.  During my time in senate I've seen plenty of programs (degrees) ramrodded through in this manner simply because one administrator or another wanted it to happen without faculty concerns being addressed.  The history of some of these new programs hasn't really been that glowing, either.

Another topic that's come up lately is the university-level committee designed to find solutions promoting academic integrity in online programs (specifically because professors had been told by the university administration that we couldn't proctor online exams). There's more about all of this proctoring stuff in a big post from last spring, and I'll refer you there for details.  It's worth your time if you've followed along this far.  The online proctoring committee was created by senate in Summer 2011.  The committee met several times and discussed everyone's concerns (the committee had reps from the dean of students' office, enrollment management, university computing, human resources, and various faculty, one or two from each school, a couple of students, etc., everyone except someone from housekeeping and the grounds crew, it seemed).  The committee's activity wasn't rushed - there was no reason to rush, after all, unless this was a widespread problem, and administrators assured everyone that it wasn't a widespread problem.

The first year we met with a couple of online proctor providers, and discussed ways to determine the identity of students when they logged in for tests, etc.  The next year some BUS faculty got our dean to agree to a pilot study, and so a handful of hand-picked BUS faculty started using ProctorU.com as a proctoring test.  The university committee wanted to do the same thing - run some pilots with the various providers to see what worked.  And we should do enough to make it fair and representative, so it might take a few semesters.  Unfortunately, UH System legal didn't like one or more of the contracts from the providers, and so the committee met a few times that second year to talk about that and see what could be done.  Nothing was done.  BUS moved ahead because it had an accreditation visit coming up, but the university committee did nothing.

I will contend that "doing nothing" was the committee's function.  I firmly believe that the university-level committee (that I was on) was convened simply to delay decisions until the administrators who were against proctoring and accountability in online classes could figure out a way to get in front of it again.  Given the university committee's results (we're in Year 4 now if I'm counting right) it's obvious to see that its objective has been met - there is still no university-wide proctoring or accountability agenda.

Meanwhile, the BUS "pilot" moved ahead.  The university initially volunteered to pay for students who needed strictly online exams, and faculty were "granted" the right to offer local students on-campus tests.  After several confrontations, BUS has decided to implement proctoring in all of its online courses (again, see earlier posts for the full skinny on this) and students have to pay for proctoring if they need to take exams off-campus.

Where were we?  We have a university committee that's supposed to provide solutions for online test cheating issues, and it's done nothing in 3+ years.  So let's create a NEW committee.  Someone in the administration doesn't like the composition of the old committee (even though it achieved the objective that administrators designed it for) so they prod FSEC to come up with a new one.

Just like CandT.  Wow.

And the absolute latest issue is the proposed "accessibility policy."  Some folks at the university level have decided that all documents must be "accessible."  As it's currently written that might mean that faculty have to change textbooks to reader-accessible e-versions or even have full transcripts for any podcasts that we do (in anticipation of someone needing those transcripts, maybe, at some indeterminate time down the road).  Once again, those folks who won't have to change anything to comply with the policy aren't up in arms about it, but those of us who teach online (and a few who don't) see this as a potential screaming academic freedom issue as well as a big waste of time.  The reasoning?  "It's the law."  Have we seen other schools in the UH System put out new accessibility policies with this type of impact?  Nope.  Nor will we see that either.  UT?  A and M?  Nope.

The accessibility policy didn't pass in senate because faculty don't trust administrators.  I have no doubt that this policy will go around senate in some manner to be implemented.

We're not talking about "rogue faculty" here folks, just people who are trying to do our jobs right.  Those of us who have asked for change, and for our opinions to be taken seriously, are just trying to move things forward in a responsible way.  We made enough noise that staff expansions at the expense of faculty were reconsidered, but only at considerable personal cost.  Loud voices got some transparency on budget cuts and allocations a few years ago.  Some of us got proctoring instituted in the business school, but only at considerable personal cost.  And it's gotten to the point that so few people in the university really pay attention and understand the issues that even faculty leadership is fully compromised now.  Why?  Because they don't perceive any consequences to themselves in the short term?  They lack imagination?  Do they enjoy being doormats and abdicating their responsibility to exercise their own judgement on these things?

I gave up tilting at windmills a while ago (things such as how many adjuncts v. full-timers we have, summer pay, etc.) and decided that I would only get riled up over things that had important effects on students and their outcomes (and things I can hope to change).  Unfortunately, all the rest of this noise is yet again making it difficult for some faculty to focus on students and employers and the community at a crucial time in UHCL's history.  

The worst part, I guess, is that all of these folks are adults, and they should know better.  That's the hardest thing to understand.

Online education in the UH System, an update

Students have asked me about the "UH Online" discussion that's been taking place over the last year or so since the UH-Victoria MBA announced that it would be leaving Sugarland.  Well, I can only tell you what I've been told by smarter people: the proposal is on the desk of the system chancellor at this point.  Evidently the systems proposed by the outside consultants would end up looking like what we already have (individual schools with individual strengths and links to programs within) and so there wouldn't be much cost savings there.  That's probably true - since faculty have to be involved in order to call something "education" then I guess online education will still be expensive when done correctly.  It's the last part that's most important.

Speaking Truth to Power, a white paper

Found this on the Web recently and thought I would share:

http://www.scu.edu/ethics/practicing/focusareas/business/truth-to-power.html

Enjoy.

Certification, certification everywhere! This reputation stuff is important

I just got back from the Financial Education Association meeting in Savannah, and it seems that everyone is interested in our old friend certification.  NASBA Center for Public Trust offers an ethics certification for students, and Bloomberg is now offering the Bloomberg Aptitude Test or BAT on top of their terminal certifications.  Finally, the CFA Institute is now offering back office and CFA support workers a certification (the Claritas Program) that includes an ethics component.

Now why would all of this external certification be so important all of a sudden?  Could it be the growth in online education?

By the way, if you want to take the BAT online (it's open to anyone, worldwide), it will be proctored.  Thanks for playing!

Followup:  We offered BAT on campus for the first time on 4/17/15.  Congrats to the folks who came out to campus to take the test.

Ben Nunnally talks about the recent merger "boom" and how it happens

My friend and mentor Professor Ben Nunnally (of UNC-Charlotte) talks with a local TV personality about the mergers that are happening right now.

http://andrewsoresentwc.tumblr.com/

Letter in The Wall Street Journal today

[This is eerily similar, but not exactly the same as, my letter that appears in The Wall Street Journal, page A16, September 9, 2014]

Online University Education Grows, With Some Bumps

I wish John B. Taylor's view of online instruction could be taken as a model for moving forward in Web education, but I don't think much of what he discovered applies to the vision of online instruction held by administrators at some smaller universities ("A New Twist in Online Learning at Stanford," op-ed, Sept. 2).

Our department began offering both graduate and undergraduate students the opportunity to earn finance degrees online several years ago. Now most of our students take both types of courses simultaneously to finish their programs of study in a timely fashion. Dr. Taylor mentions that he made videos of his lectures and then handed them over to "producers" to mix in other content. At our university the "producer" role is limited to fighting fires due to understaffing, and faculty are left to do things on their own (if we get the time to do them at all). We discovered too late that a good number of our students couldn't take more than one online class per semester because they were in the U.S. on student visas. All students in online courses receive the same credit as traditional students, with the result being that the reputations of both modalities are commingled in the minds of students, employers, alumni, faculty and administrators. In our experience it seems that none of those constituencies take online course work as seriously as traditional instruction.

Finally, our business school went through accreditation review in 2013 and the online courses created the biggest issue for us.

Timothy B. Michael, Ph.D.

University of Houston - Clear Lake

[end quote]


Boy howdy the phone has been busy today.

I've received some questions from folks today asking why I didn't mention proctoring in my letter.  Well, I DID mention proctoring, but it was edited out.  So I've taken the opportunity to mention the fact that we weren't allowed to proctor in the online comments section.  I also mentioned the class size issue in a separate comment.  For those of you with subscriptions, I recommend reading the comments and/or adding your own perspective.

Dilbert's creator thinks the government should create an "investing pyramid" similar to the "food pyramid"

Yeah, because that Food Pyramid has worked so well...

Hey, he has a degree in economics, people, and he's not afraid to use it...

Seriously, though, he may be on to something.  Certainly people need to understand that passive investing remains a pretty good choice, if not perfect by any means.  But does the government need to remind folks of this?  Perhaps they could subsidize and update of "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" or write a Cliff Notes version for the masses.  Burton Malkiel told us about how the market worked more than 40 years ago, and yet so many people still miss out.

Good thing for financial advisors, not so much for investors (unless they're paying for piece of mind, which I imagine that many are).  Scott Adams suggests that financial advisors be required to disclose that their services have been proven scientifically unnecessary, but that has been understood for a while I think.  Perhaps researchers should go back to trying to understand why people invest in the first place.

I'm not an investment advisor, but it seems to me that paying for investment advice in this day and age is kinda iffy. Even sketchy, perhaps.

The Success that is Houston (and Texas) in today's WSJ

WSJ has an op-ed today that outlines how and why Houston (and Texas) has outpaced the rest of the country in terms of growth, prosperity, etc. for the last two dozen years or so.  I remind my students of this all the time, so I'm glad to see it in print yet again.

We currently live in the most successful economy within the most successful state in the union right now.  The only real competition is DC, and we all know where THAT economic "growth" comes from.  I know this sounds like John Kerry's dreaded "exceptionalism" but the numbers are what they are - Houston's been pretty successful, and there's more success to come as the energy industry ramps things up over the next five years.

I sure wish the authors would come back and look at some of the hair-brained things that Houston city government has done in the past 10 years, just for a sense of contrast.  The light rail fiasco comes to mind as a great example of how to NOT do things.

Can flipping the classroom help students learn? Sure...

Just found this Slate article on classroom flipping.

If by "flipping the classroom" you mean "requiring students to actually come to class prepared," then the answer is a resounding "yes."  If you mean "take all of the rigor out of the class and turn it into in-class group projects" then probably "no."

Rasmussen: Only 20% of likely voters think global warming debate is over

Drudge today has a link to a Rasmussen poll showing that the overwhelming majority of likely voters think that the global warming debate isn't over yet.  Better yet, they have a link to the questions so you can see that it wasn't done in some heavy-handed and sneaky way.

John Cochrane on the failure of macroeconomics, Paul Krugman's fallacy

There's a great piece in today's WSJ, but of course it's behind a paywall.  So here's an article that discusses it, with liberal quotes:

http://uneasymoney.com/2014/07/02/john-cochrane-on-the-failure-of-macroeconomics/

The best line is a reminder of how blinded some people can be when it serves their politics.  Cochrane points out that even the great Paul Krugman has squinted under the lights of his high ideals:

"Paul Krugman writes that even the "broken windows fallacy ceases to be a fallacy," because replacing windows "can stimulate spending and raise employment."

Uh, the fallacy of the broken window is about how spending "government" money is supposed to be a stimulus of some sort.  So Krugman actually asserts that it's a matter of scale?  What?  That must be drastically out of context, right?

Here's the full quote, and it doesn't help his case:

"This puts us in a world of topsy-turvy, in which many of the usual rules of economics cease to hold. Thrift leads to lower investment; wage cuts reduce employment; even higher productivity can be a bad thing. And the broken windows fallacy ceases to be a fallacy: something that forces firms to replace capital, even if that something seemingly makes them poorer, can stimulate spending and raise employment."

It just makes it even clearer that Krugman doesn't understand the fallacy, or perhaps how to use analogy.  The fallacy itself doesn't suggest that the window needs replacing in the first place, but that the window was working perfectly and then was broken, needing replacing.  It's the assertion that government spending is somehow separate from the private economy that's the fallacy - money spent to repair the window wouldn't have been used for any other investment.  Of course replacing capital can help the economy, but only if it actually needs replacing.  That's the breakdown I think.

No, Dr. Krugman, the fallacy of the broken windows is just that, and it doesn't change by scale or by how hard we wish it to change.  In this case the window seems to broken enough to give a distorted view of reality.

The myth of the 97%

I think it was Joseph Goebbels who said something like "a lie repeated becomes the truth."  He wasn't the first I'm sure.

The latest reminder of the truth of this statement is the '97% of the world's scientists tell us this is urgent" on global warming.  That would seem to put me in the minority of scientists.  But the Wall Street Journal today has an editorial that explains it.

I wouldn't want to spoil it for ya, but it ain't really 97% of scientists.  Far from it.  Unless they are political scientists.

Online proctoring and cheating at UH Clear Lake: What really happened.

I've heard so many different stories  about what happened last fall that I thought I should set things straight.  There have been plenty of outright "official" lies told about me and others or I wouldn't bother writing this.

This isn't about student dishonesty - that could happen at ANY school, and it does.  I believe that the overwhelming majority of students at UHCL try to be honest - they're the ones I want to see protected, along with the alums (reputation).  The trouble at UHCL happened because university and college administrators conspired to keep faculty from proctoring in online classes in order to try to artificially boost enrollment in the short term.

What follows is exactly what happened, regardless of the rumors flying around out there.

In finance we had been on the front lines of the academic honesty problem for several years already.  (This isn't news for those of you who follow this blog.)  Dr. Williams was going nuts trying to take away the unfair advantage that some students had in her classes: she had had students sitting in Neumann Library taking tests together, having "house parties" to take tests, taking turns passing and failing from one test to the next, passing info around, etc.  She even had a couple of students get together so that one student could use the IP from free coffee house wi-fi while the other used the IP of the burger joint next door (these folks worked several problems the same wrong, obscure way, and turned the exams in within a few moments of each other - our data folks dragged their feet and stopped handing out BlackBoard IP addresses after that).  I had had multiple students copy from Wikipedia into my essay questions, cut-and-paste from prepared documents on tests, and cut-and-paste from test bank solutions that they had obtained online (fortunately I had changed the questions, but they didn't notice that part).  I had students resubmit essays by other students from earlier semesters.  Something had to be done to change the culture of academic integrity at UHCL, and nobody in the administration was being supportive, even after years of effort on the part of me and a few others.

It simply isn't fair to honest students to let dishonest students have an unfair advantage (see our paper about it here).  Fairness here is called "student equity" and it has a big impact on outcomes and student morale. And faculty morale, it seems.  In fact, there's a phenomenon I call "defensive cheating" or cheating by otherwise honest and competent students who would suffer a huge welfare loss due to the rampant cheating of others.  I've seen plenty of honest students tempted to cheat over the past 10 years because their GPA was hurt when they didn't cheat and others in the class did.

The Visit

My remarks to the AACSB visit team in October 2013 came after several years of work on my part to establish a protocol for proctoring of tests in online classes.  Hell, I was just trying to get permission to proctor tests in my online courses, to have some control over the test material and outcomes.  The administrative team at UHCL had been standing deliberately in the way of that control for years.

During their meeting with tenured faculty, I told the visit team that several faculty had documented issues with cheating in online classes on this campus, and that we had been systematically prevented from proctoring by our department chair (at the time), who then became our associate dean, by the dean of BUS, and by the provost's office according to the definition of "online programs" as interpreted by Enrollment Management.  I told them that I was on the university committee tasked with finding a solution, and that the committee was a sham, just a stalling tactic that had persisted for more than two years without any results.  Finally, I said that as an engaged and responsible faculty member I had no confidence that there would be either a BUS or university proctoring pilot or viable solution once the visit team left campus and turned in its report.

[Sidebar:  I will maintain that the only reason we had a pilot study in place was because there was an accreditation visit on the way, but that's just my opinion.  Our pilot study was using university funds to pay for proctoring for students enrolled in online courses, and we had been told that the nebulous "System legal" had said that students couldn't be asked to pay for their own proctoring services online and that we couldn't ask them to come to campus.  How would that arrangement ever be allowed to continue or grow past the pilot stage?]

As we were telling the BUS team this stuff in our meeting, a couple of accounting faculty members were evidently telling the accounting team the same kind of thing in a separate meeting - that they had also been prevented from proctoring in online courses on orders from folks at the highest levels of the university.  

Immediately after meeting with faculty the visit team(s) met with two groups of students, undergrads and grad students, and the grad students complained about both face-to-face and online cheating, and the lack of proctoring.

Let me be very clear here:  I had no role in picking the grad students who talked to the visit team, or in prepping them or telling them what to say.  I've been told that this rumor is out there, and that it's being spread by senior leadership - it's not true.  From what I understand the job of picking students was left to the accounting chair, and she ended up with the leadership of various student organizations in that bunch of grad students.  Those students told the visit team what concerned them, without any input from me or any other faculty member that I know of.  [If I had thought of it, I would certainly take credit for it.  But I didn't think of it.  I haven't needed to connive, scheme or exaggerate when talking about academic integrity issues, unlike my opposition.]

The day after the visit I asked the dean, in writing, for a copy of the visit team's preliminary letter (which is usually provided before they leave campus).  I was told that it wasn't available yet, which appears to be true.  I later asked for copies of what the school had received, via the Public Information Act, and was told that the school wasn't required to make that public.  In February 2014 I found out that the Texas Attorney General's office had denied a UH System request to keep the visit letter private and the AG required UH System to send it to me.  Later that month the dean was nice enough to simply hand out the team's "revised" audit letter, the version that had all kinds of gory, specific details about what the visit team had learned while they were here.  The second one seemed much more direct to me.

The dean held a faculty meeting on November 1st to tell us all that the news was really bad, and that the team was concerned about cheating, and that we were in big trouble.  He also told us that the president and provost "did not hold the School of Business without blame," and that if enrollment went down then there could be jobs lost, etc.  He stormed out of that meeting without taking any questions.

Denial, it seems, isn't just a river in Egypt. It's clear, too, that the Kubler-Ross model was just getting warmed up with these guys.

At the December faculty meeting, the dean announced that all 63 online courses starting Spring 2014 would be proctored, and that students would be required to come to campus or use ProctorU.com at their own expense.  We'd have an honor pledge (a rehash of the existing UHCL language) and a "retreat" where we came up with ideas about academic integrity, etc.

Every hurdle we (the faculty) had faced for more than 4 years was swept away in 7-10 business days after a threatened negative audit report.  All the hurdles at the UH System legal level, if they had every really existed, disappear almost overnight.  It was amazing.  Poof.

Now we're proctoring, and the school is on "continuing review" with AACSB to make sure we iron some things out.  It didn't have to be this way, but the administration's lack of action (and deep denial) led us to this point.

It should be noted that I and others have been "punished" for being vocal about this, mainly through eliminating our committee assignments and/or reducing our annual review scores for last year.  That's the cost I guess.  Leadership isn't cheap or pretty.

Oh, and we still don't have a "hotline" for the anonymous reporting of academic integrity issues, although that's clearly an ethical best practice. It was recommended by faculty at the "retreat" but the dean has refused to do it, saying at our last faculty meeting that the "hotline" was his number.  Okay then.

That's the short version, and the outcome.  The rest of the story is below - this outcome was a long time coming.

The Details

In the summer of 2009, I was told via email from my then unit chair that Deans Council had voted to require all online classes to be tested online, and that any form of proctoring, even at remote sites, would be considered a "face-to-face" requirement.  Over the next few years, I and other faculty in the unit prosecuted more than several cases of plagiarism, collaboration, cheating or attempted cheating during online exams.  We took many measures (clamping down on test windows, etc.) in order to prevent cheating.  In general, our measures made it very difficult for both us and the honest students every semester.

Finance put its BS and MS programs online in 2009, as I recall, at the request of the provost's office and enrollment management.  Note that in order to abide by Enrollment Management's edict about "no proctoring" the finance undergrad program was forced to change its curriculum to go fully online - we had to add a new pseudo-Intermediate Accounting class that would be taught online and could only be taken by our majors.  This new class would NOT serve as a prereq for Intermediate Accounting II.  One of the most unique things about our majors had been, to that point, that they had to take Intermediate Accounting, and most took Intermediate II as well.  After the change we had two distinct groups of students - those who HAD taken a F2F Intermediate class and those who had taken the online substitute course. (Or, those who understood accounting and those who really didn't.)  The accounting unit (rightly so) would not teach Intermediate Accounting in an online format because it would hurt their accounting-only students when they applied to take the CPA exam.  That reason, and because the university would not let accounting proctor in online classes.  (This ultimately led to the former department chair resigning and being replaced by the current chair, too.)

In January 2012 I asked students in one of my classes to either come to campus or go to an off-campus proctor (approved in advance by me).  When my dean found out he told me to change this syllabus as it was against "university policy."  I changed it (my biggest mistake in all of this).  

Our SACS 10-year visit was that semester, and the week before the site visit the Office of Online Programs decided to host a sudden Friday session on the proctoring of online courses and invited ProctorU.com to give faculty and other interested parties a presentation.  This session was announced on either Wednesday or Thursday before that Friday session.

The SACS team had sent a list of questions that it wanted answered during the site visit, and it seemed that the nature and quantity of online course proctoring at UHCL suddenly seemed important to them.  Therefore, a session was laid on to show that we were appropriately concerned here, as well.

I attended the Friday session, and a ProctorU rep came online and demonstrated the product.  I asked my former chair and now associate dean (who was there) why we were having this session when university policy prohibited proctoring in online courses.  I was told to consult my dean before adding proctoring to my online classes for the summer.  

 

My dean confirmed early the next week via return email that there was in fact still a university policy that prevented me from proctoring in my summer classes.  The SACS visit was across that Wednesday, which was also the day that the revised online policy (Policy 10.6) containing the definitions and catalog descriptions of "online" courses was going to be brought before faculty senate.*

I argued in senate that the course definitions were unnecessary because of the existing "no proctoring" policy confirmed the day before by my dean.  I also argued that the "no proctoring" policy should be part of the university's online policy in the faculty handbook.

In faculty senate that day the provost publicly denied that there was a university policy that stopped us from proctoring in online classes, and said that it was a matter of whether a class was designated as "online" or not, or perhaps whether the class was part of an "online program."  We in senate had already heard from Enrollment Management several times during the earlier debate over the online policy that classes in "online programs" had to be tested only via BlackBoard because they were advertised as being "fully online."  The provost later that week or the next confirmed at the separate BUS faculty meeting that he and the dean had been told by UH System lawyers that there was a "truth in advertising" issue and therefore we couldn't proctor tests in "online programs."  My dean said then, at that meeting, in front of everyone, that he couldn't stop us from proctoring in our classes, but that he would "prefer" that we didn't.

At some point along the way I had discovered the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board listing of state laws covering "Distance Education."  That includes Rule 4.262.6 that says (in part)

(6) The instructor of record shall bear responsibility for the delivery of instruction and for evaluation of student progress.  [Link]

That's a hard one to argue with.  (However, #2 under that rule says that online courses must be subject to the same standards as on-campus classes, and UHCL still has a separate QA process for online courses.  So "the law" applies differently for different things, I guess.)

After the online policy passed in senate, the provost prompted faculty senate to convene a special ad hoc committee on online academic integrity and proctoring at the university level.  The committee was chaired by someone who was, to put it politely, trying to earn political points with the provost.  The committee was staffed with a few faculty (me included) plus someone from HR, someone from the Dean of Students' office, someone from Enrollment Management, someone from the Office of Online Programs, and a couple of folks from University Computing.  A couple of students were put on there too, for good measure.  As might be expected, the committee met a few times over a two-plus-year period and never came up with anything.  At the last meeting in September of 2013 the subject turned to the question of why we couldn't include the newly-funded Testing Center to help with some of the testing of online students.  At that meeting we were told by the chair that UH System lawyers were still struggling with the idea of allowing us to have pilot studies in some of our classes.

Knowing that an accreditation visit was due for the Fall of 2013, the BUS dean allowed a handful of faculty to use ProctorU.com in pilot studies beginning in Spring of 2013.  The pilot study was tightly controlled by the provost's office, with the provost "allowing" us to offer on-campus sessions for those who wanted them and then having us pay for ProctorU.com service for students who couldn't come to campus.  Obviously, having the School of Business pay for proctoring in online classes was not going to be a viable long-term solution, but I'll argue that it wasn't supposed to be - there was no intention of letting proctoring continue.  I'll venture that the plan was to let the visit pass and then suddenly declare that it wasn't important.  That, or let the visit pass and then have the university committee impose some half-hearted "solution" that the provost's office would back.

In the meantime, the online policy in its necessary form passed through shared governance.  That policy contains a link to a Web page that lists course modality descriptions - that link was made necessary to support the continuing fiction (the "Big Lie") that online classes (or classes in "online programs") can't be proctored because they are 100% online.

That linked page is here (at least for now), downloaded 5/10/14:

http://prtl.uhcl.edu/portal/page/portal/PRV/OnlinePrograms/Online_Programs/FacultyResources1 

None of that material ever went through shared governance.  Those definitions (and catalog descriptions of modalities and OPALS) were created by the provost's office, and all of this was done in order to maintain the creative fiction of enrollment management that online classes can't require proctoring of any kind without the permission of enrollment management.

The table is reproduced here in case it should disappear in the future:

The online course instruction and delivery modes, as classified in PeopleSoft, are listed in the table below.

Delivery Mode	Instruction Mode	Online Course Description
Fully Online	WW	All class instruction and course requirements are available online. No Face to Face is required.
	WR	All instruction is online BUT expect limited mandatory Face to Face sessions, such as orientation, exams, or presentations.
Partially Online	WE	Online delivery is substituted for 50% or more of scheduled course materials.
	WP	Online delivery is substituted for less than 50% of scheduled course meetings.
Face to Face with Web Shell	WS	100% of meetings are Face to Face with supplemental material online. This mode is not considered to be an online course.
	P	100% of meetings are Face to Face. This mode is not considered to be an online course.

Although we were not allowed to use the "WR" designation in past years, in Spring 2014 the School of Business changed its delivery mode to "WR" in all online classes.  That semester we had 63 online sections.  Of course we didn't proctor in all of those classes - some professors just changed their assignments so that they weren't "exams" anymore and called them something else.  Those professors continue to give tests in BlackBoard without proctoring - but that's their prerogative to do so.  See the link above - it says "instructor of record"...

It's also my prerogative to proctor in my online classes.  

As of December 2013 School of Business has a proctoring policy in place.  Students can come to campus on a Saturday (scheduled) or they can pay for ProctorU themselves.  We also allow them to use NCTA testing centers, just not the one at UHCL.

The university-level ad hoc committee on proctoring has yet to get UH System lawyers to approve a pilot program for testing proctoring solutions at the university level.  As of May 2014 the faculty senate president is "reauthorizing" the proctoring committee, whatever that means, even though it's never been "reauthorized" before.

The net result is that the administration and faculty are now paying attention to the academic integrity issues that arise with online programs (after just 10+ years).  It was a long time coming, and only a failure in leadership on the part of many individuals got us to this point.  I was simply not willing to let it continue to be a failure in leadership on my part.

Update:  I forgot to mention this part, but UHCL used to have an active Teaching-Learning Enhancement Center (TLEC) that hosted guest speakers and discussions between faculty members every year.  This center has been dismantled by the current provost, pending "reorganization" next year with the now-familiar committee and perhaps a staff member to organize and coordinate things.  That was the only formal outlet on campus for faculty to get together and talk about solutions for cheating, online cheating, and plagiarism.  In fact we did just that over the past few years: Dr. Williams and I presented a very popular paper on online cheating in April of 2011, and several other faculty members held forth on online instruction and cheating just last year.  That paper is available online here.  Is it any surprise TLEC was eliminated?

The Lesson Here

As my students know:  Reputation is everything.  That idea won a Nobel Prize a few years ago.  And our reputation was being sold down the river because of a few myopic administrative types who didn't have to deal with the long-term fallout of their decisions.  Shame on them.

My official email address is michael at uhcl.edu .  I can also be reached at tbmichael at gmail.com . Comments welcomed.

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* The SACS visit schedule that was sent out to several faculty chairs on the day of the meeting changed the time such that those folks didn't get to meet with the SACS team.