Provost Stevens addresses online class format in Faculty Senate meeting, officer elections held

Provost Cheryl Davis fields questions from faculty members during the faculty senate meeting on Thursday afternoon. The provost discussed reallocation of money in the senate budget, representation of minority student populations and a state orchestrated program evaluation.

Abbey Nutter

The Faculty Senate held officer elections and were also addressed by the provost, who addressed plans for the Fall 2020 semester during their meeting Thursday.

Officer elections ended with Julie Shadoan as Senate chair, Dan Clark as vice chair and Laura Bohuski as secretary. Other approved motions included senate charter revisions.

Provost Cheryl Stevens said over the past week, her office has worked at being flexible with faculty requests.

“We want faculty to be successful this semester, but we also want students to be successful,” Stevens said. “A lot of policies and practices, we’ve been very flexible about how we go about implementing those, especially this semester.”

Stevens said faculty transitioned more than 2,500 face-to-face course sections to digital format.

“They created more than 2,500 videos and micro-lectures on media site alone and more than 600 faculty attended 29 webinars on Zoom and Blackboard tools,” Stevens said.

Stevens thanked faculty for trying to navigate this challenging time and acknowledged the amount of effort to accommodate the lack of in-person instruction.

The details of course delivery for the Fall 2020 semester is still unclear, Stevens said.

“I can tell you that we are really starting to launch some serious work and thinking about what that could look like,” Stevens said.

News reporter Abbey Nutter can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on twitter @abbeynutter.