Since my hire at OIT, I have served on committees at the department level and institution level. My teaching and research focuses on general education and assessment, so I have gravitated towards committees and institutional service that serve those goals as well.
Non-Committee Service
Institutional Service: WRI 227 (Technical Writing) Outcomes Revision
As part of my service on the Technical Communication Curriculum Committee, I participated in the group to assess the role of WRI 227 at OIT in 2018. The project’s goal was to review WRI 227’s function for various programs and see if it was meeting that general education need. This consisted of a survey to faculty about their experience with WRI 227 (as a subject-matter expert for students or in any other capacity), a review of student work produced in the course in previous years and interviews with faculty from several departments, particularly where WRI 227 was a listed prerequisite for upper division courses.
The end result of this assessment was that program needs were not significantly different from what WRI 227 offered, but the course’s learning objectives were not explicit enough to students or faculty (even those of us teaching the course). We revised and standardized the outcomes to a short list of six assessable outcomes (see p. XXXX), which are now included in every WRI 227 syllabus.
Departmental Service: MadCap Scholar Program
A professional connection at the Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication conference in Minneapolis in 2019 (see CITATION) recommended the MadCap Flare computer program for courses teaching structured authoring (e.g. PWR 315, PWR 320). Flare is an industry-standard program in technical writing and documentation. The software is very expensive for an individual license ($149/month in 2021), prohibitively so for a student. I worked with Jennifer Morse at the MadCap company to join their MadCap Scholar program, giving OIT a set of licenses for one computer lab each year for free so Professional Writing students could become familiar with a tool that is in-demand in their field (over 200 LinkedIn job posts list MadCap Flare knowledge as a requirement or perk in August 2021).
Standing Departmental Committees and Service
Assessment Coordinator, Communication Studies and Professional Writing
I took on the role of Assessment Coordinator for Communication Studies in AY 2018 and began the Professional Writing program assessment in AY 2019, its first year of reporting. Both of these programs are housed within the Communication department. As the Assessment Coordinator, I began moving toward an annual assessment of all PSLOs in 2018 as a means to capture more useful data about our programs. Because both programs are small relative to others at OIT (the larger, Communication Studies, typically has 40-50 students), a direct assessment of 1-2 PSLOs each year was not an effective snapshot of our program. Assessing all PSLOs with direct measures from many courses each year has allowed us a broader look at our curriculum and its needs. One result of this broad look at our curriculum was the creation of COM 135: Office Software (see pp. XXXX for description, pp. XXXX for proposal materials and syllabus).
Technical Communication Curriculum Committee, Member and Chair
Since AY 2017, I have been a member of the Technical Communication Curriculum Committee, and I have chaired it since Winter 2019. As chair, my major accomplishments have been working with committee members to find solutions to understaffing problems: the core courses that many of us teach (WRI 227 and WRI 327, specifically) are heavily overenrolled: 50% more students enroll or attempt to enroll in WRI 227 than we have seats for in any given term, while about 30% more enroll or attempt to enroll in WRI 327.
In AY 2019, we opted to remove the “Technical Reader” requirement for student reports in WRI 227, as loss of faculty across the university made that task especially onerous for students (to find a reader) and for faculty (who might be a reader for several students in a term). Prior to the COVID move to online instruction, we were developing a program-wide strategy for incorporating subject-matter experts into the report without requiring the Technical Reader partnership.
Composition Curriculum Committee, Member
Since AY 2017, I have been a member of the Composition Curriculum Committee, which reviews the curricula of WRI 115, WRI 121 and WRI 122. As a committee member, I have used my background in program assessment and data analysis to help inform decisions about placement in first-year courses based on test scores (pp. XXXX) and to understand how our curriculum should respond to the number of students transferring writing credits in from other schools.
Communication Studies Advisory Committee, Member
Since AY 2017, I have been a member of the Communication Studies Advisory Committee (CSAC), offering input on students’ programs of study submitted to the department prior to graduation. The function of these programs is to show what courses a student has taken in their focused sequence and what courses they intend to take: faculty then give the student’s advisor input on additional or alternative courses that may serve the student well in their career path. These meetings are also de facto reviews of the program’s learning outcomes and long-term goals, which informs assessment reporting each year.
Professional Writing Advisory Committee, Member
Since it formed in AY 2018, I have been a member of the Professional Writing Advisory Committee.
Ad-Hoc Departmental Committees
Hiring Committees, Member
I have been a hiring committee member in two hiring committees for tenure-track positions (2018 and 2019). I have also been on hiring committees for two non-tenure-track positions (2020, 2021) and adjunct pool recruitment (2020). All of these hiring committees were within the Communication department, for positions that focused on Human Communication (e.g. SPE 111, SPE 321), Academic Composition (e.g. WRI 121, WRI 122), Professional Writing (e.g. PWR 330) and Technical Writing (e.g. WRI 227, WRI 327).
Institutional Committees
Academic Technology Advisory Council, Member
As a member of the Academic Technology Advisory Committee (under then-CIO Jim Jones), I participated in the classroom technology evaluation of 2017/2018. I worked with Ken Davis (Mathematics) and Travis Lund (Natural Science) to develop our technology rating rubric, and I worked with Ken Davis to rate several rooms on the Klamath Falls campus. The rubric and ratings were ultimately used to prioritize technological upgrades and repairs to classrooms, using Jim Jones’ full-room improvement model (in which projection technology, whiteboard/chalkboard, seats, desks, wall treatment and lighting were all addressed at once) rather than piecemeal updates or repairs of individual issues.
Communication ESLO Committee
I was a member of the Communication ESLO committee (under Matt Schnackenberg) through AY 2018 and AY 2019, but I was removed from the committee upon becoming Chair of the Assessment Commission Executive Committee. During AY 2018, the committee was in its Analyze year, during which we primarily reviewed faculty responses to the Communication ESLO rubric and sought information about where faculty were doing assignments that might build from that rubric. During AY 2019, the committee was in its Engage year. We chose to engage the university through an assignment design workshop that connected elements of the Communication rubric to course or assignment objectives.
Assessment Commission Executive Committee, Member and Chair
I joined the Assessment Commission Executive Committee as a member in Spring 2018. As a new faculty member at OIT, I spent much of my time as a committee member learning OIT’s institutional history with academic assessment and the new procedures developed by Seth Anthony and Janette Isaacson. I had the opportunity to travel to the IUPUI Assessment Institute (p. XXXX) with both of them. Due to a series of unforeseen events, I was the only one able to attend. Several sessions at the institute were valuable for planning possible assessment strategies moving forward (like a session by presenters from Northwestern University on the use of natural language processing to find themes in student surveys or course reviews), but they have not been pursued very far due to COVID interruptions.
In Fall 2020, I was placed into the Chair position for the committee. As AY 2020 was impacted heavily by COVID-19, most of the Executive Committee’s energy was spent in finding ways to support academic assessment amidst a significant loss of faculty and time for assessment procedures. Ultimately, we found that COVID struggles were highlighting existing problems faculty had with assessment reporting: gathering artifacts often required additional steps that created delays (or complete loss of data when a faculty member left OIT), relaying assessment results and making plans required large blocks of time that not every program had available, and novice Assessment Coordinators often felt lost in the process until they had completed several reports. The Executive Committee formed plans to address these concerns and streamline the assessment reporting process. These improvements will begin in Fall 2021.
