Text of David Finegold's Email to Paul Panayotatos and Natalie Borisovets, February 2012:
There are several
different efforts going on which we would welcome the Senate’s involvement:
-
I’ve proposed a task force to Pres. McCormick to examine how RU organizes to meet
the needs of non-traditional students. Creating a School to serve this population,
like most of our peers have, would be one option it will consider. My current
thinking would be that if we went this route, the School would not have tenured
or tenure track faculty. Have proposed Sam R. be on this to represent
both Camden and the Senate
-
We are excited to be bringing together many of the different units involved in
supporting online education and doing research on best practice in digital learning
into a single unit. This would include COHLIT headed by Rich Novak, CTAAR
and a new RU-wide research center with faculty from GSE, SCI and other schools.
We had over 300 faculty and staff register for our conference last week on online
and hybrid learning. A major goal of this effort is to insure strong
faculty governance and input into our online learning efforts so that they
match or exceed
the quality of what
we’re doing f2f. Gary G. will be chairing an operations group from the
different academic units and we’d be pleased to have Natalie join this.
-
There is an RFP now out to have a private sector partner work with us to help
develop, market and support a set of fully online degrees. Proposals are
due back on Jan. 18. Faculty will retain their instructional oversight
role and Schools will retain control over admissions. The group that will
be reviewing the proposals includes faculty from many schools.
In addition to the
items you mention, Joanna and I were also in the process of sending a proposal
to Dick and Dick to create a committee that would look at the issues involved
in Rutgers creating a campus abroad. They looked at a couple of possibilities for this on their just
concluding China trip and we have also been exploring an opportunity in
Georgia. Was going to propose that you sit on this group if you’re
willing Paul. Given stiff competition with other groups, we’re
going potentially to
need to act quickly.