DDLC Meeting — February 2, 2006 
Blue Ridge Community College    10:00 a.m.

Attendees:

Kristen Kelly                         Mary Clare DiGiacomo

Susan Beasley                      Bill Hightower

George Hoffman                   Bob Vawter

Leslie Smith                          Scott Langhorst

John Downey                        Neil Matkin

Inez Farrell                           Rebecca Blankenship

Steve Sachs                         Monty Sullivan

Jamie Shetrone                    Susan Kennedy

Stacy Harris                          Susan Wood                        

Response to Commission Paper

          John summarized the recent history of the DDLC, pointing out the development of the position paper on the status of distance and distributed learning in the VCCS relative to Dateline 2009.  He indicated that DDLC members pledged to take the lead in offering solutions to the issues cited in the position paper and that the Commissions process was an effort to do that.  John asked Monty to respond to the commission memo sent in September and pointed out that the commissions were structured to address the issues identified in the position paper.

          Monty thanked the committee for the work done to date and indicated that the governance structure for deciding academic issues related to distance and distributed learning was a primary concern for him.  He indicated that at the last ASAC meeting, the recommendation to disband ASAC’s DDLC was withdrawn at his request.  Monty indicated that he wanted to make sure that policy issues were decided by the Vice Presidents through ASAC.  He recommended the augmentation of ASAC’s DDLC with representatives selected from this DDLC.  He asked for an open discussion of how distance learning academic policy issues could be best addressed in the VCCS. 

          After a lengthy discussion, Monty suggested that Steve Sachs, as the leader of the Governance Commission, draft a proposed governance structure for determining academic policy relative to both the DDLC and the ASAC-DDLC.  Steve indicated that he would distribute that draft to DDLC committee members and Scott added the topic for discussion at the next ASAC-DDLC.  Monty worked to restructure all ASAC committees such that greater representation would occur for each of the four ASAC committees.

          Next, Neil was asked to update the committee on some of the response time issues that occurred early in the academic year.  Neil was asked about the DDLC commission suggested process for determining whether specific software requested by colleges should be elevated to Enterprise versions or not.  Monty and Neil suggested that such a process should be discussed after the governance issues are settled so that the method of how policy decisions are made becomes clearer.  Rebecca asked about how such decisions might be made in regards to Blackboard plug-ins in the meantime.  Neil agreed to take a look at a list of free plug-ins provided by Rebecca to determine if their utility could be examined by his staff on the Blackboard test server.  Rebecca compiled the list and the DDLC passed a formal request, later in the meeting, to test the plug-ins on the Blackboard test server

After Monty and Neil left for another meeting, more discussion ensued among the membership regarding governance.  Several members expressed frustration over the length of time that is being spent getting organized rather than making decisions.  Members expressed some support and some reservations about the proposal to have ASAC-DDLC augmented by DDLC members for policy decisions. 

DL Survey

After lunch, Bob Vawter made a presentation on the preliminary results of the pilot study of distance learning students at five VCCS Colleges.  The purpose of the pilot study was to establish a survey that mirrors the CCSSE so that we can administer a similar survey to distance learning students across the system on a regular basis.  A meeting will be held of the survey committee in mid-March to discuss the preliminary results and to finalize the survey and a survey process for system-wide dissemination.

Miscellaneous

                    Jamie reported an update for Tim Tirrell on the cost for licensure of Annenberg Content beginning in the fall.  Member colleges that use Annenberg video content, such as Destinos etc., should monitor developments at the Annenberg website located at http://www.learner.org/telecourses/index.html 

John updated members on two separate conversations related to distance learning that have occurred.  First, CFAC discussed distance learning with the Chancellor at the November meeting.  As a follow up to the meeting Tom Sparhawk e-mailed CFAC reps to report that the VCCS will be updating distance learning testing guidelines.  Scott reported that ASAC will be looking at the Quality Assurance Document and updating or reaffirming some of the aspects of the document at the next ASAC meeting.  DDLC members endorsed a recommendation for ASAC to examine the QAD.  John also indicated that the instructional deans discussed distance learning at a session they held at the Homestead in November. 

DDLC members also endorsed a recommendation to ask the VCCS to study the utility of adding several free building blocks on the Blackboard Test Server for possible deployment in the production instance of Blackboard.  The list recommended for consideration by the DDLC is attached to this document. 

The next meeting is tentatively scheduled

for FRIDAY March 31 2006 at PVCC

The meeting adjourned at 2:45 pm.

Blackboard Free Building Blocks From Blackboard.com

From:

http://www.bb-opensource.org/download.jsp

Search Content

This tool allows students/staff to search for text within a course. The extension will allow the user to choose whether to search folder names, item names, and/or item description fields. Full regular expressions are supported. Srch.zip

Frequently Asked Questions Tool

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