This message was sent to all faculty and staff via email on Feb.2.
Dear Colleagues:
Welcome to the spring 2021 semester. I hope that the winter holidays allowed restful and restorative moments, even as I acknowledge that many of you spent time in preparation for spring semester courses, making progress on scholarly/creative work, advancing service contributions, and attending to other academic matters, variously because of and in spite of the pandemic. A number of faculty taught winter session courses so that students could get ahead or catch up and stay on track towards timely graduation. Dozens of faculty devoted themselves to preparation of dossiers for reappointment, tenure, and promotion. Many colleagues reviewed plans for remote spring semester courses, utilizing tools such as the Open SUNY Course Quality Review (OSCQR) rubric. While the holiday break may not have allowed setting aside of professional responsibilities, I hope that it offered occasional respite and reflective moments.
In this report, I will address student and faculty support, provide announcements and updates, and call attention to faculty achievements, awards and honors, and other recognitions. However, this report is different from others in that I will be making one specific request of the faculty as well as of staff who provide student support. This one request rises above all others right now as I will share in the first paragraphs below.
Initiatives in Support of Students
Helping to Fight Academic Lonerism – Promoting the CircleIn Study App
Academic Lonerism – In many ways more virulent than COVID-19 itself is the pandemic of academic lonerism spawned by COVID-19. Even in the best of times, this syndrome can derail any student. Enter CircleIn which is a study app developed with National Science Foundation (NSF) sponsorship. New Paltz, being the leader among institutions that it is, has signed onto a pilot program this spring, as announced recently to the campus in the Daily Digest.
I am asking that you help fight the secondary pandemic of academic lonerism under COVID by making sure that every student knows about CircleIn and obtains the CircleIn app. The app is available to students via their Blackboard (Bb) accounts. My urgent yet simple request to you is to let students know about CircleIn and that they can access it via their Bb accounts. There is no added work for you as a faculty member.
To learn more, go to https://faculty.circleinapp.com/newpaltz and see also these information sheets found below: CircleIn Faculty Welcome Guide and CircleIn – The place for remote learning.
Why do I make such a specific request of you? The power of student-created, student-directed study groups has been robustly demonstrated via the findings of the Harvard Assessment Seminars some years ago, that students who engaged in this high-impact practice had higher achievement and higher satisfaction with the college experience than students who did not. In yet another powerful example specific to mathematics, Philip Uri Treisman, MacArthur “genius grant” awardee, developed the Mathematics Workshop Program (MWP) at Cal Berkeley, based on the practices of students who were overwhelmingly successful in Calculus 1A, the gateway course to the STEM disciplines. These students had created their own out-of-class study groups and as a result engaged in key strategic study behaviors, which largely accounted for their success. The MWP program changed a pattern of disproportionate rates of failure in Calculus 1A to a sustained pattern of success for underrepresented students and working-class students not only at Berkeley but across the hundreds of replications of the MWP on campuses across the country in the ensuing years.
Akin to outcomes for the MWP, in emergent data on its impact, CircleIn appears disproportionately beneficial to underrepresented students, an effect quite possibly due in considerable part to the capability of this study app to reduce or eradicate academic lonerism. Under COVID, the scourge of academic lonerism has affected all students to some degree, but especially students from more vulnerable populations. I should mention that it is from Phillip Uri Treisman’s work that I first learned the term “academic lonerism.”
Before turning to the rest of my report, I want to thank the Information Technology Services staff for working so hard to set up the infrastructure and interfaces necessary so that New Paltz students could have CircleIn available and ready to go in Blackboard in order for the College to run the pilot this spring. The increases in student success that I am highly confident we will see will, in no small part, be attributable to ITS staff’s behind-the-scenes and often unsung work!
Expanded S/U Grading Option with Extended Spring Timeline
Please share with your advisees that the Expanded S/U Grading option continues this semester as in the fall. Students can exercise this option through the last day of classes on April 29. See more from Records and Registration here, including a matrix summarizing how the expanded option differs from the regular S/U option.
SUNY Support for Students in Online and Remote Learning Environments
For faculty who may want to refer their students to SUNY support for student learning in online and remote courses, please refer them to the information and help found here. As you no doubt know, our own campus continues to provide numerous resources to support students as well as faculty in online and remote learning environments, as you will find here.
Support of Faculty and Staff
Recent Communication on Spring 2021 Semester In-person Start
In case you missed it, please see the recent communication on what faculty should know about the in-person semester start on Feb. 1. Along with important academic calendar clarifications for the spring semester about earlier dates for final exams as well as changes to our Mind, Body, Spirit dates, the letter described the significant changes in SUNY’s COVID-19 testing and screening requirements, and various consequences for students. In terms of the calendar, it is worth reiterating that the original Mind, Body, Spirit (MBS) days have been changed at SUNY’s direction. These dates, when no classes must be held and no assignments made due, are now the following: Tuesday, Feb. 23, Wednesday, Mar. 24, and Thursday, April 15.
Faculty Development Center (FDC) and Office of Instructional Technology (OIT) Programs
A plethora of programming and resources continues to be offered in support of the faculty through the Faculty Development Center (FDC) under the leadership of Sarah Wyman as well as the Office of Instructional Technology featuring the work of Kate Bohan and Rich McElrath. Please continue to avail yourself of the programming and resources that faculty leaders and staff colleagues continue to organize and conduct in order to support faculty and staff during these extraordinarily challenging times.
Peer Instructional Design Teacher Mentors
The Peer Instructional Design Teacher Mentor program instituted in the fall as a pilot is being continued this spring. Please look for announcements of the support, such as drop-in hours, that these colleagues are preparing to offer this spring.
SUNY Survey and Support of Faculty
SUNY announced recently the work of the SUNY FACT2 Task Group on Examining Pedagogy and Learning in Online Domains (ExPLOD). The task force along with the SUNY Center for Professional Development and the SUNY Office of the Provost are interested in learning more about faculty perceptions and experiences within online and remote teaching environments. We have been asked by SUNY to circulate a survey to our faculty members (e.g., tenure track, non-tenure track, clinical, and adjunct faculty) between Jan. 26 and Feb. 14, 2021.
Please anticipate the survey to be forwarded to all faculty members from our Office of Institutional Research.
SUNY has also asked campus provosts to help ensure that all faculty are aware of the support services offered by SUNY for faculty teaching in online and remote formats due to COVID-19 impacts. These system wide resources, available in addition to our many campus resources, can be accessed here by faculty wishing to explore SUNY’s resources and help.
Coming Soon: Middle States Institutional Accreditation Review Visit in March
Middle States Evaluation Team Virtual Visit
SUNY New Paltz’s Middle States Commission on Higher Education (MSCHE) Evaluation Team Visit is scheduled for Wednesday, March 24 – Friday, March 26, 2021. Due to COVID-19, the visit will be virtual rather than in person. A team of volunteer peer evaluators from MSCHE member institutions will evaluate our college, drawing upon the analysis in our self-study report and insights gained from interviews with faculty, students, staff, administrators, members of the College Council, and other members of the College community to confirm and clarify the information provided in the self-study report and to gather additional perspectives.
On the final day of the visit, the Team Chair will present an oral exit report to the campus. For each standard, the chair 1) will indicate whether, in the judgment of the team, the College appears to meet the standard; 2) may offer recommendations for improvement and innovation or for requirements, if non-compliance is indicated; and 3) may identify significant accomplishments, progress, or exemplary or innovative practices for each standard.
All visiting team members will be present for the oral exit report and it will be open to all members of the campus. However, because the oral exit report is an internal event, external parties, such as the press, are not invited. Furthermore, the session should not be videotaped or otherwise recorded, or transmitted in any way beyond the campus community. MSCHE will issue its formal action after its next regularly scheduled commission meeting, which for institutions with spring 2021 visits is June 2021.
Recent Faculty and Staff Awards, Honors, Publications/Creative Work, and Other Recognitions
News of faculty accomplishments often appear in the daily digest. You will also find recent recognitions of faculty and staff accomplishments at the following link: https://sites.newpaltz.edu/news/category/research/. Please do not hesitate to submit news of your awards and honors, publications/creative works, or other recognitions of your accomplishments to the Office of Communication & Marketing.
Closing
As always, my deep appreciation goes out to the dedicated faculty of New Paltz for your demonstration of unwavering commitment to the success of our students. In this report I have asked for a demonstration of that support in a very particular way, requesting that you make sure that all of your students know about and access the CircleIn study app. Thank you in advance, if you have not already helped students connect via CircleIn. To those faculty who have already done so, a hearty thank you!
With best regards,
Barbara
Barbara Lyman
Interim Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs
