Has anyone heard about Lynn B's new thumbs up/thumbs down tabs in the Canvas shells starting in September for the new year? Students can secretly use it to rate their teachers and only the deans can see it!
Wish they had one for her-but people may use the wrong digit!
@UTIPYw4-9vze...I think he was an assistant high school principal back in the day...the kind who ran around checking names off lists...taking attendance...making sure everyone behaved...disciplinarian...not much else
The Burks I knew wanted nothing more than to teach business and economics at a small liberal arts college, where she could ride her bike to campus, hold an occasional class on the patio by a lake and meet her colleagues face-to-face.
I don't think we're talking about the same person.
91yh...that's too bad...I know a couple of people, three, actually, who would like to move up, and can't, because of the bottleneck. You'd think a new owner would want new leadership...
Unfortunately!
@UTIPYw4-9vze They're still around?
The school is a scam, and Zorek and King are the scam artists. They are good at hiring stooges to carry out their orders-Assistant Deans of Academic Excellence.
As someone who knows this better than most told me..."Seems like an attempt at formative assessment, but not well conceived. Just another example of schools trying to use business models - not always the best fit."
Lots of research out there that shows the more emphasis put on student evaluations for faculty retention, the greater the grade inflation! It had already reached unbelievable heights at DeVry when 40% of full-time faculty were released in 2016 when that 3.6 out of 4.0 number was already in place and was fully executed! Seriously, in what universe does a 90% grade equal failure and result in someone being dismissed from his/her efforts? ONE class that was full of non-acheivers and complainers who never did their work in an 8-week schedule could sink ANY faculty member's evaluation score average!! It's Crazy Town, and I feel sorry for students and faculty who remain and have yet to find a way to escape :-(
I was a student and I can only hope other students are reading this page. A’s are given for little or no work, it only took one email for my part-time Professor to give up.....
Yes, it would generate more fear to actually show faculty the scores. Makes more sense as an intimidation tool. Gotta keep those students amused (so they persist). I quit last year after they had dumbed down the intro courses so much that even I couldn't even justify them as college-level work. The accreditors really need to look at what's being passed off as college level content. There's not enough work in the intro courses and it's not hard enough at all. I tried for years to push harder for better content, but admins just kept watering it down. Gotta keep those students persisting, though! What's next, driving to the students' houses and doing their homework for them?!?!
Administrators, deans, pink panthers--they can hardly say, don't hold to your standards. The idea of "persisting" students has always been shady: you cannot persist a student who cannot do the work because he/she is functionally illiterate. You cannot persist a student who will not do the work because he/she has a family, job, and other claims on his/her time. Whereas faculty (at least in other schools) have been supported in sticking to reasonable standards, at DeVry, they are not. Stick to your standards, but when end-course evals are not a 3.6 or better...buh-bye. And students with gripes (legitimate or not) use evaluations to vent and damage faculty. Even a 3.0-3.5 is a damaging assessment in crazy town, DeVry.
From what I have been told, faculty will have access to these comments. I think the point is that many of us are feeling extremely pressured to increase MCE scores without any consideration as to how it affects our teaching. While we hold to our standards, how many times have we given "a break" to a student who didn't deserve it for fear that he or she will give us a horrible rating that would affect our job rating. Now will they also be using these totally unreliable scores to rate us? Of course they will!
On what basis is the claim that only deans can see it being made? Faculty can see the survey and the results.
DeVry is a joke. These fools in leadership positions are concerned with one thing and one thing only: how to increase their stock options. They care nothing about education. I feel bad for the students spending thousands on a worthless education.
Fools making processes to keep their jobs. This process as well as all others will not save DeVry. Too bad the focus has never been on the quality of education for the $$$$. Leave. There are places with ethical leadership and educational standards. DeVry is joke in the industry, it took me awhile to find a way out due to the place being a joke but it can done.
: @UTIPYw4-5tzu ...Well, I know in the past deans had access to faculty shells, in order to monitor response rates...grades in on time...timely responses to emails, presence in the threads...why are students, essentially, being given the same power as the deans?
Sorry for any lack of clarity in my previous post. The email said that the students are going to have voting items to complete in Weeks 1 and 3. They will look like quizzes in Canvas but will not be related to the course content...just their thumbs up/down about the course (and faculty). They will be items that are presented to to students like assignments, and from what AI can tell, thy will have their own grade book entry for completion? Not sure if they can assign any pints to it since they weren’t allowed to do it for the course surveys
@UTIPYw4-1pka ...what makes you think this was her idea?
@UTIPYw4-4spx ..ok...I'll watch the video...but what you're suggesting is that in the first term classes, students get to provide feedback on the quizzes they've taken? What could they possibly say? Too hard? Too easy? And how does that translate into useful data in the Week 6 evaluations? Is someone seriously suggesting student feedback is going to influence course curriculum?
Verifying the claim. According an an email, "some" courses (didn't watch the linked video, but guessing first-term?) will have yes/no voting buttons as quizzes in Weeks 1 and 3, and a link to the survey in Week 6.
I would say that faculty are often asked to carry out a task by administrators--though, I'm no longer part of it all, that's how it worked when I was there. Faculty, to survive, often put themselves at odds with other faculty to curry favor. Administration tried to make us all into c---er spaniels...
Both
so...according to @UTIPYw4-4hhe ...Michelle Bradford's behind this, and not Lynn Burks.
Go to the Center for Teaching Excellence and click on the Announcements. Michelle Bradford has posted a video explaining the new process and addition to our shells!
@UTIPYw4-2vrq ...Not likely...given the adversarial relationship which exists between deans and faculty, plus the fact that most deans live in fear of people like Tim Zorek and the other enforcers, there's no way on earth a dean would share this as it would land in a forum like this. Fake news.
@UTIPYw4-2vrq talk is cheap...you can't fudge your way around this with a simple "my dean showed it to me." Half the people walking around this place have the word Dean in their titles...and 3/4 of them wouldn't know what a dean's supposed to do if their lives depended on it.
You're going to have to better than that if you expect to be taken seriously.
My dean showed it to me.
Hey, @UTIPYw4, @UTIPYw4-2yoj is right. If you're blowing smoke, then you've seriously undermined what little morale we have left. You need to come clean and tell us the source of your information. Otherwise, pipe down.
what's the source on all this...
LB. She’s terrible. I feel sorry for those stuck working with her. Im not surprised this is her idea.
So faculty must continue to shamelessly pander to students for a thumbs up or lose their jobs...yet another gash against education. Pure slime...
these people are completely nuts. my hunch is that all this automated "analytics" data they would be generating through "pulse" bs and making adjuncts do survey for repeat students would go into a blackhole because they have no actual humans employed there on the receiving end. id--ts.