How can online resources help campus committees?

Wendy Duckering
former Administrative Assistant, Dean of Faculty

Overview - A discussion of scanning evaluation from professors worldwide and from former and current students into PDF files and then putting them into Sakai so that the professors on the APT Committee can look at them each week from the convenience of their computers before discussing the promotion/contract renewal case at weekly meetings.

As the recording secretary for the campus APT committee, Wendy Duckering has seen the shift to using Sakai, the college's online collaboration and learning environment. When she started in 2006, computers were not used at all because of concerns about confidentiality related to contracts, appointments, promotions, tenure, renewals, leaves, etc.

How confidential APT materials are secured in Sakai

• All documents are scanned into secure PDF documents before they are put into Sakai. They can only be read online. They cannot be printed, nor can excerpts be copied and pasted into another document. These are features related to Adobe Acrobat.
  
• Only the Dean of Faculty, members of the APT committee, and the committee's recording secretary (Duckering) are member of the Sakai APT site and can access it.

Advantages

• Convenience: using Sakai, committee members can read and prepare for weekly meeting from anywhere with Internet access (vs. the Dean's Office from 8-5).
• The site materials can be undated continuously. Members can be notified automatically and have immediate access to newly uploaded documents.

Duckering noted that once the committee members figured out how to use Sakai, they loved it because it gave them better access to materials. Agendas and minutes are also sent by email and can be archived in Sakai. More campus committees are using Sakai, for example, CORE review and the Intercollegiate Women's Studies review.

Online Resources

• Introduction to Sakai at Scripps
• Sakai portal at the Claremont Colleges
  
• More about the Sakai project