President's Report 1/10/25

January 10, 2025 / Lyndsay Rhodes

Board of Trustees & Board of Governors

Next BOT meeting is January 14th, 8:30am in AB9 138. Agenda and materials have been posted to the BOT website. I encourage you to review the agenda and let me know if you have any feedback on the items to be discussed and/or voted on. Additionally, the has been an effort for the BOT to hear from university shared governance stakeholders with rotating reports from Student Government, Staff Advisory Council, and Faculty Senate. This month, I will be giving a short report from Faculty Senate during the regular meeting. I’m requesting that you send any items you would like me to highlight from Faculty Senate and faculty more broadly to demonstrate the important work we do. Please have any info to me by Monday end of day.

There will be an update on our Student Success Plan which we are required to report our results to the Board of Governors in March to have the remaining $3.67 Million held funds released. There will also be information regarding the SACSCOC site visit scheduled for Feb 24-27. There will also be a couple of nomenclature and CIP code changes. Music - Performance (B.A.) will be changed to Music Performance (B.M.), CIP 50.0903 (Music Performance, General), and Mathematics (M.S.) will be changed to Applied Mathematics (M.S.), CIP 27.0301 (Applied Mathematics, General), effective Fall 2025. These changes are the result of accreditation recommendations (outside accreditors) and to more accurately reflect the course of study.

There is a proposal to be approved by the BOT for a CIP code change from 52.1201 (Management Information Systems, General) to 30.7101 (Data Analytics, General) and name change from Information Systems and Analytics (M.S.) to Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (M.S.). In this case, the CIP code was not available when the program was created, though it better aligns with the curriculum of the degree. If approved, these changes will also have to be approved by the BOG staff.

I will be attending the next BOG meeting at the University of North Florida January 29-30. The agenda has not been released, but I will learn more at the Advisory Council of Faculty Senate pre-BOG meeting scheduled for January 24th. I encourage you all to keep an eye on the BOG agendas as they are released and please reach out with any feedback regarding the items on those agendas (or anything else you would like me to communicate to the Governors).

University Updates

The university will be launching a new 24/7 online tutoring service for students at the end of this month. Lindsay Rushworth, Director of the Center for Academic Achievement will be coming to our next Senate meeting to give us more information, so have your questions ready. This will not replace our current use of CAA or departmental tutors, Learning Assistants, or other programs, but is meant to be a resource for students from any location at any time of the day. Also, the tutoring provided is personal and not AI.

Wings Up for Student Success platform is still under development and will be launching soon. Dr. Eileen DeLuca had mentioned this platform last semester when we were discussing the tie ins with Canvas utilization, and you all received an email update recently out lining some of the functions. More to come, but this is a step forward for faculty to be able to track actions taken with our students.

On that note, a couple of reminders for this semester as we pilot the integration of Canvas data with the Wings Up platform. Please remember to set assignments in your classes for week 3 and week 7 is possible. These are meant to reflect an early checkpoint for students to gage their progress in class before the drop date and to get them connected with services in time to intervene for success in your courses. We are also asking that faculty get in the habit of tracking attendance, though you do not have to report this in Canvas at this time, as we are looking into better solutions for attendance tracking.

Provost and VP SSEM searches are underway. The committees are meeting next Monday. You received an email with links to watch these meetings. Dr. Jamie MacDonald will be joining us today to give us an update on the Provost search and I encourage you to provide feedback and are active participants in these searches throughout the process. I have not heard yet what will be scheduled for on campus interviews, but I will keep you informed on when and where faculty events will be taking place as we get more information.

Reminder that Annual Professional Development Reports (APDR) will be submitted through Interfolio this year. This is our first year working through this new processes and there may be a bit of a learning curve, but trainings will be offered. Training dates and other resources can be found on the Interfolio Resources webpage.

Announcements

2025 Digital Badge Summit will take place at FGCU January 28-29, 2025. There was a link sent out for reduced registration for FGCU faculty ($60). This is a great opportunity to learn more about what FGCU is doing with digital badging and how that fits in to the national conversation, and how you can connect your work as faculty to these initiatives. More info can be found at www.fgcu.ed/digitalbadgesummit.

Textbook attestation – will be required this semester. AA working on a mechanism. Stay tuned.