Florida bill calls for MOOC accreditation, FIU weighs options

Florida bill calls for MOOC accreditation, FIU weighs options

FIUSM-17 hours ago

As a professor in the realm of the humanities, she said that “there isn’t a lot of agreement about what areas of content should be covered and how we would define the skills that students would have to have to demonstrate the mastery of a course’s learning objectives.” “It’s also hard to test for general skills that we might all agree to, such as critical thinking,” Shrage said. “So, designing tests that allow students to earn college credit for a course will mean that we need to make similar courses across institutions more uniform.”

Tom Auxter, the president of United Faculty of Florida, warned the Inside Higher Ed of a “cheap and dirty” online education. “Online education can be done well or poorly, like anything else,” Shrage said. “ Like Auxter, I worry that educators will not be given the resources to produce high quality online courses, where students are able to interact with subject experts and their peers, and where students get a reasonable amount of individual attention.”

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FEA Frontline Report

Bargaining Update: December 16, 2013

Dearest Faculty,

I was hoping that I would be able to send you Holiday Greetings that included a “gift” of concluded negotiations for our CBA. This, however, was not in the cards because the administration was unwilling to compromise.

On December 5^th  and 16^th , the administration stated that they must have the following items in order to wrap up negotiations:

                              1) non-tenured track faculty

                              2) change in load points

                              3) changes in tenure and promotion

In exchange for these, they offered a lump sum of $100,000 to $120,000 to address the market inequity of some of our faculty members and the 2% cost of living increase that was given to the rest of the college.

We have continuously gone to the table with honest attempts to counter with offers that allow the administration as many items from their must-have list while making every effort to minimize the impact on working conditions and job security on our faculty members.

We recognize that the State Board of Education has changed its rules and that it will take longer (5-7 years) for faculty to gain continuing contract in the future; however, the rule also allows for grandfathering in (3-5 years) faculty hired before the rule change. Just like students being allowed to follow the catalog under which they started school, the administration should honor the rules for attaining continuing contract that were promised to faculty when they were hired.  And although the state board rule now states that you MAY establish a non-continuing contract faculty, it does not state that you SHALL, and it has plenty of wiggle room for the impact to be tempered.

And then there are the issues we don’t understand! If, as administration states, the proposed change to load points is not about money, why would they want to reduce load points for clinical labs? The impact will be that faculty who teach those will be forced to teach more for less. If, as they state, it’s about trying to reduce the clinical lab class size for nursing, why are they involving dental hygiene and EMT? And if they already have five nursing positions they’ve been unable to fill, how will increasing their load and lowering their ability to get overloads help them fill those positions? And if there is not enough room in the hospitals for the number of labs now, how will reducing the class size (and consequently having to increase the number of labs) be realized? And when did an administrative decision to lower a class size correlate to less load points to the faculty member (and isn’t that a scary precedent)?

When we pose questions like these to the admin bargaining team, they seem to understand our concerns and even seem to recognize the honest attempts to compromise in our counter offers. As a matter of fact, we genuinely thought that we had some real movement yesterday (even possibly a settlement). The administrative bargaining team asked for a two hour break so that they could confer with those who have the authority to accept the deal we offered--we were very hopeful! Disappointingly, they returned to state that they could only reoffer the same deal they had started with and that the admin was unwilling to compromise on ANY of their positions—except, they offered a one-time bonus (non-recurring) of a whopping $300!! Do they really think that we are so easily bought off?

So- surprise, surprise—we have not come to an agreement on our contract!

I am, however, very grateful to the many faculty members who were in attendance, and believe it or not, you really are important to the process. 

The next bargaining session will be on Wednesday, January 29^th, 2014 at 2:30 PM.

Enjoy your much deserved break,

Jennifer Brahier
PSCFA Chief Negotiator

 

 

 

Salary Comparisons

Beginning teacher with a Masters at Santa Rosa County Schools:

source: https://www.santarosa.k12.fl.us/contracts/1314InstructionalSalarySchedule.pdf
length: 196 days - https://www.santarosa.k12.fl.us/contracts/SRPE2011_2014.pdf

Beginning teacher with Masters at PSC:

source: http://www.pensacolastate.edu/docs/cba/ARTICLE_15.pdf

Faculty Member Speaks Out

It has been very disturbing to me to sit and watch the administration at each and every bargaining meeting completely disregard the role that full time faculty members play at PSC. What I really mean is how the administration’s lawyer interprets the role faculty plays, because nobody else on the administrative side ever says anything anyway (yet they get paid quite nicely to bargain, hmmmm?)

Without our quality instruction, we would not be known as one of the best community colleges to attend. Adjuncts are great, but let’s face it, a college can’t exist without the dedicated full-timers. There are so many of us who could be working at higher profile jobs, making more money, but we chose to stay local, give back to the community of Pensacola, and do what we love: TEACH. For the first time, I am second guessing my decision for working here. Instead of worrying about what lesson I am going to be teaching the following day, I find myself worrying more about how my job is going to be affected again by changes the administration is trying to make. At the root of this worry is how the administration is trying to change the load points for several departments. Have any of them (admin) visited these specific departments and really dug into what goes into running these various programs? Absolutely not. To say that because a program doesn’t make enough money for the college, we are going to reduce the money going to the instructors running it is just ridiculous. All this is managing to do is pit departments against each other, instead of uniting us. If this logic is what salaries should be based on, then why are department heads, deans, VPs, and even the president paid so much more? What money do they generate for their areas? Better yet if faculty have to suffer, then shouldn’t other PSC employees sacrifice something too? I want an administrator to explain to me, to my face, why my hour of instruction is worth less than someone else’s hour of instruction! Each department has a crucial role at the College, but more importantly, in the community. The college should be supporting every faculty member equally, because that is the right thing to do. I have an even better idea: if the administration wants to save money, then how about they consolidate some of the administrative positions for once?

I think it is time to get this story out to all the trustees and more importantly the public. It is time for our community to understand how little respect the faculty are receiving here at PSC and because of that we now have no RESPECT or CONFIDENCE in the abilities of our administration!!

Thank you to all those faculty members in leadership roles and on the bargaining team willing to put their time and essentially their careers on the line to represent the best interest of all faculty. They may be trying to get rid of some of our best faculty, but we will not give up the fight. WE ARE PSC….and students keep coming back for us, not the administration.

Bargaining Update!

Well--what a crazy round of bargaining (if you can call it that!) we have been experiencing this year.It seems that for every two steps forward, the administration backs us up three! It has been frustrating for all. Anyway, after the ridiculous articles presented by the administration on October 10th, we really thought that our willingness to try to come to terms with a possible temporary full-time faculty track had caused the administrative side to back off their draconian positions. We really (and possibly foolishly) thought that the positions (which show a complete lack of respect towards faculty) were meant to scare us into allowing the temporary full-time faculty track (TFF). Once we presented a comprehensive article which allowed for a respectful and judicious use of TFF, the admin team seemed pleased with us and seemed willing to back off their harsh positions and promised to come back to bargaining on October 17th with new articles reflecting mutual ground. You can only imagine our shock and dismay when ,on October 17th, the administration presented to us the EXACT articles they had presented on October 10th. So some progress made -The admin did agree to back off striking all references to starting salaries for newly hired faculty -They agreed to a pot of $100,000 for us to start repairing market inequity among some of our members -Surpise, surprise--they are willing to give us a 2% raise Please, please take the time to read the proposals and mark your calendars for the next bargaining session at 2:30 PM on November 14th. But before then we've got some work to do. We need to be at the next Board of Trustees meeting on Tuesday, October 22nd at 5:30 PM--they need to know that we are UNITED and won't sit still while they try to negativeley impact our work conditions, and subsequently our ability to maintain high academic standards for our students. Also, keep an eye out for an anouncement for a faculty meeting for us to share concerns and strategy with each other. And last but not least, please post all comments and concerns on this blog instead of through work email--we would not want anyone to suffer any repercussions for using work email. And please remember that we cannot fight among ourselves--we all need to offer the support and respect to our fellow faculty members that we are NOT recieving from our administrators!

Bargaining Update: October 17

Although administration's reps indicated that they were working diligently toward compromise on the open articles, what they presented Thursday didn't indicate much "compromise."  Instead Articles 9 and 17 were essentially re-presented with minor changes---changes which actually moved further away from the middle.

It seems that the administration believes that throwing some money at the faculty will make us agree to draconian changes to load points, continuing contract language, involvement in decision-making, non-tenure track faculty and more. What the administration did offer was the following:

• a flat 2% raise to base salary
• the starting salary and experience pay schedules to remain in the contract
• $100,000 to be allocated among all faculty who did not receive full experience pay upon hire, the method of distribution to be determined by PSCFA
• 5% for each raise, with a minimum of 5 years in rank to be eligible for promotion

What administration is still holding out for would substantially increase the workload for Collegiate High and ABE, health occupations, seat-hour classes:

                                             Current Points                        Proposed Points

Collegiate High:                              50                                             36

PSAV lecture:                                60                                             36

PSAV lab:                                      40                                            36 

ABE lecture/lab:                             40                                             36

Clinical w/student supervision:         50                                             30  

Externship:                                     20                                             15    

In addition, the administration wants the ability to hire non-tenure-track faculty teaching 1260 load points per semester up to 25% of the number of tenure-track faculty. These temporary faculty would do no departmental or college service or professional development. The administration also wants to be able to hire these faculty with NO hiring committee, NO advertising of positions, and NO faculty input into the process. 

The full text of administration's proposals can be found in Jennifer Brahier's e-mail of October 17. 

The next bargaining meeting will be November 14 in the Atwell Room of the library.