Faculty Council Update on Discussions with Provost Re: Mask Order, Master Course Table, Caps, Dual Credit, and Final Exam Schedule

Happy Friday, Faculty Association Members,

Today your DCCFA Council met with the Provost, Vice-Provosts, members of AST, the Critical Response Office (CRO) and Educational Partnerships (EP, which is dual credit). Below is a recap of what we discussed. Please reach out to us if you have follow-up concerns or questions. Additional context may also be found in this recap of the August 19 meeting between the same group of administrative leaders and the School reps. 

 

COVID/Masks 

• The Dallas College mask mandate is still currently in place, so plan to wear your masks and plan to remind students at the start of your classes that the mask mandate is in place. 

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• Dr. Floyd recommended opening class with something like, “Dallas College has a mask mandate for all employees and students that is intended to help us all feel safe and be safe as we learn and work together.”  

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• Chief Critical Response Officer Sharon Davis recommends focusing on de-escalating and positive reinforcement rather than singling out non-compliant students because of how politicized this situation has gotten. They want all students to feel safe and learn and do not want to put anyone at risk of a confrontation that could turn violent. So, they will be working on getting more information to us Monday. Still, in the meantime, they asked us to please refrain from demanding students wear a mask and be aware that the police cannot assist in this situation because they are not allowed to enforce a mask mandate with no legal consequences. You can record their name on your roster and submit these violations to the student code of conduct, found through the Office of Student Advocacy.  

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• Disposable masks will be provided on campuses, but Dr. Floyd said they may not be all in place by Monday. 

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• Syllabus: Dallas College will communicate the following language via eCampus for faculty to use in their syllabi: 

 

To align with County Judge Clay Jenkins’ Order of August 16, 2021, employees and students are required to wear masks while at Dallas College locations or events. The CDC recommendation applies to both fully-vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals as Dallas County is an area of high transmission of COVID-19. 

Master Course Table 

The master course table (MCT) has finally been posted! It is on the Faculty Load Portfolio (ACH) Share Point site that Dr. Morris included in his email this morning (August 20), which is also where the ACH calculator and definitions and ACH manual are available. If you did not attend one of the summer sessions, there is a recording of one of the sessions there, too. 

 

Schedule and Section Caps 

• This topic was a robust discussion about the importance of respecting faculty needs and pedagogical considerations before raising caps. 

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• Dr. Floyd particularly, but also several vice-provosts acknowledged that there were communication failures this summer as the schedule changed and caps changed without warning to faculty. Dr. Floyd stated that the chairs (or deans if there is not a chair yet) should obtain permission from the faculty for an overload and that the need for an overload should be discussed with the faculty. 

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• Dr. Floyd and several vice-provosts, particularly Dr. Walker, stressed that they would be working to improve these communication errors because deans and chairs should have been keeping faculty more informed. Dr. Walker stated he will have his chairs find out faculty preferences so that their process will go more smoothly in future semesters once they have that information in advance. Please note as an aside that we did not talk about whether deans or chairs were informed themselves, due to time and the focus on what faculty were not told in time, but the next bullet points address that. 

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• Dr. Floyd and several vice-provosts reiterated that the Vice-Provosts are responsible for ensuring their deans and chairs are sharing the information needed with faculty and to ensure faculty preferences are collected to get back the missing institutional knowledge. They stated that they will work to improve their communication and try to ensure they respect faculty preferences on cap raising in the future by collecting that information earlier and communicating more quickly when student enrollment indicates there is a need to raise caps or add sections.  To improve communication, they referred us to the new School Share Point sites that list all the leadership and titles so we can easily find who we should be talking to in our School. 

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• Dr. Floyd agreed that it is preferable to keep course caps at optimum and add sections when possible. This is another area they hope to improve as we learn more about the new system and enrollment management.  The Council suggested putting into place an automatic notification of changes as well so faculty are informed and can reach out themselves if their dean or chair misses it or is out of the office. Dr. Floyd made a note and will investigate it. 

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• The vice-provosts stated that if a dean/chair does NOT inform you of something, you should let the vice-provost know quickly by email because they are responsible for following up to find out where the communication failure occurred. For example, if you see a class which you were assigned has disappeared from the schedule and your dean/chair did not tell you about it the same day it happened, email this information to your vice-provost providing dates and times of the prior conversations about this assignment and when the course disappeared from the schedule. It could be an error, or it could be a failure to communicate – your vice provost should help with this. 

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• Dr. Floyd stated that if the vice-provost does not help with this in a timely manner, loop her into the situation by providing your last communication with or to the vice-provost so she can follow up. The DCCFA faculty recommendation is to please wait at least a business day before including the provost unless the situation is truly urgent. 

 

Educational Partnerships / Dual Credit 

• There were some classes with zero enrollment – those are being cancelled. They started two weeks ago, continued into this week, and were completed Friday morning, August 20. Your dean or chair should have notified you if a class was cancelled that you were scheduled to teach. If not, see the note above about letting your vice-provost know so they can close those communication gaps. 

 

Final Exam Schedule 

• This fall Dr. Morris stated, and Dr. Floyd concurred, that we will keep the normal weekly schedule of class meetings for finals week. This means that you can administer your final exam on either of your two class meeting days (Monday or Wednesday for MW classes or MWF classes, for example), but it needs to fit within the normally scheduled 80-minute class time.   

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• Contact hour requirements will be met by a single class meeting of 80 minutes during finals week, so there is no need to meet on both days. 

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• The DCCFA Council pointed out that students may end up overloaded with exams on the same day and offered to make recommendations for how to stagger the final exams to spread them out for students. Dr. Floyd and Dr. Morris gratefully accepted the Council’s offer to provide these recommendations, which we will get to all faculty by the end of next week so they can be added to your syllabi.  For now, please post syllabi with TBA on your final exam date/time and you can update the posted versions once we have these recommendations. 

All members of the Faculty Council contributed to this report.