Impact of the Cal. State Univ. Strategic Plan on Instructionrs & Ed Tech

A few days ago, the California State University System released its new three-year Strategic Plan. As the largest university system in the United States by student enrollment, it is not surprising that the Plan seeks to emphasize course flexibility for students (e.g. more easily transferring credits among our 22 campuses; more easily enrolling remotely in courses at other campuses) and simultaneously emphasizes faculty pedagogical exploration and innovation, particularly in the realm of educational technology.

Strategic objectives involve:

1. create flexible learning pathways
2. enhance resource sharing and coordinated talent deployment across universities
3. achieve exceptional [faculty/staff] retention rates that drive outstanding student outcomes while enabling flexible deployment of talent and resources across the system
4. leverage alumni to support student career advancement

Together, objectives 1-3 combined suggest that we're going all-in on ed tech and asynchronous/remote learning (and maybe also less hiring, as the system wants to leverage its experts that are currently distributed across our campuses?) The Plan asserts that students

"demand flexible learning pathways that accommodate work and family responsibilities. They seek career-relevant skills that can immediately be applied in the workforce. They expect seamless integration between high-quality in-person and digital learning experiences."

Some goals aligned with the objectives include:

• "Launch a Technology Innovation Center designed to incubate educational technology solutions that advance technology-integrated teaching and innovative pedagogies."
• "Enable 25% of students to access courses and programs across universities through seamless technology integration, faculty and student exchange programs, and other collaboration vehicles"

The Chancellor's Office concludes that essential system capacities to build include:

• "fundamentally strengthening the Chancellor’s Office capacity to lead system transformation and coordinate implementation across all universities." (read: more administrators?)
• "Build comprehensive faculty development infrastructure to support educators in adopting new pedagogies, integrating technology, and designing experiential learning opportunities" (read: more investment in faculty professional development - hopefully!)
• "Develop systems and incentives that enable faculty, programs and resources to be shared across universities" (read: more work and less hiring?)
• "Build capacity for piloting, evaluating, and scaling innovative educational technologies that enhance learning experiences and support diverse student populations and learning modalities."
• "Establish and operate the Technology Innovation Center to support faculty experimentation with emerging technologies while building systemwide capacity for responsible evaluation and implementation of new educational tools and platforms." (read: more fiscal investment in ed tech)

Given that the CSU system just (hastily) rolled out a deployment of ChatGPT to all faculty, staff and students in the system over the summer, I hope that the last two bullet points hint at initiating and continuing efforts to explore the ethical use of AI in higher ed. 

California State University January 22-26 Faculty Strike

The California Faculty Association (CFA) is the union that represents the 29,000 professors, lecturers, librarians, counselors, and coaches that work for the California State University (CSU) system.

Because of a recent breakdown in negotiations over our next contract, CFA has called for a historical strike of all represented employees on all 23 campuses of the CSU system, which is the largest public university system in the United States.

Below are details that might be useful to visitors that have been directed to this blog post from my out-of-office email autoresponder or from social media or other methods. These represent my own personal views and opinions as a Professor in the CSU system.

Media Coverage

Here is recent coverage from the California State University, Fresno ("Fresno State") Collegian, the student newspaper, on what precipitated the strike:

https://fscollegian.com/2024/01/cfa-and-teamsters-head-to-the-picket-lines-once-again/#

and here is where to find more information from the CFA union:

https://www.calfac.org/strike/

Why strike?

Please see the above links for more details. Essentially, the represented employees (faculty, lecturers, coaches, counselors, librarians) play critical roles in educating and supporting our students. Especially in the last five years, while inflation has been increasing, we have not been given raises that keep pace with the increased cost of living. A primary concern is that administrators (the Chancellor of the CSU system, the President of each campus, and their ever-expanding cohort of Vice-Presidents) have been enjoying massive raises (up to 29%). And, the CSU system has also approved a substantial increase in tuition (up to 34%) at the same time. This all raises questions like, "Where is that money going, aside from to the salaries of administration, especially if the financial outlook in the CSU is dire enough that we need a student tuition hike?" Given that the CSU does not exist without the instructional staff represented by CFA, why aren't we being compensated appropriately?

There are additional concerns the CFA has about a new contract as well, involving campus policing, lactation spaces, parental leave, gender-neutral bathroom access, the need for more counselors to support students, and other topics - none of which the CSU administration has yet demonstrated interest in negotiating. Because faculty working conditions are student learning conditions, we are raising attention to these concerns to improve our ability to teach and mentor our students.

Who is not part of the strike?

Of all of the CSU employees, some are represented by unions other than the CFA. For example, many staff members are represented by other unions, and teaching assistants (graduate students) are represented by another union. None of these unions are part of the planned CFA strike.

Will all instructors participate in the strike by withholding their work (i.e. not holding classes?)

It is the decision of each individual employee represented by CFA whether to honor the picket line or not (to cross the picket line and conduct CSU work during the strike). Without direct communication from each instructor, it will not be clear until you show up for class January 22-26 whether the instructor will be present or not.

What will campus be like during the strike?

You may see messaging from administration indicating that campus will remain operational during the planned strike. This is true, but only in the sense that administrators, most staff, and students might come to campus as usual. And, some classes might indeed be held (by faculty who choose not to strike, and perhaps by TAs). However, I predict that the majority of faculty will be on strike, and thus that the majority of classes will not meet. Please do not expect things to be normal on campus next week.

What will happen during the strike?

In order to be legally protected during an authorized strike, union members who choose to strike must withhold all of their labor from Fresno State. They cannot choose to do some work but not other work, or to strike on some days but not others. For students, the most impactful aspects of this are that striking faculty will not be working on campus (or remotely), or teaching, or grading, or holding any meetings, or even communicating in any way (email, Canvas, etc.) during the strike.

If you come to campus, expect to see members of the CFA union (and other unions joining in sympathy strikes) on picket lines around campus.

What happens to employees who strike? Should I report instructors who do not teach their classes?

Because those who choose to strike are not working, they understand that they might not be paid for those days they are on strike. The CSU administration has been contacting students and suggesting that students report which of their instructors do not hold class. The main reason CSU administration wants students to report this information is so that they have evidence of which instructors have chosen to participate in the strike (and which have not), to make their job of figuring out who to dock pay from (and how much to withhold) easier, because they don't otherwise have a way to know which faculty are on strike. It is absolutely your decision whether you want to report striking faculty or not. If you support the strike, then you can choose not to make such reports.

Do students support the faculty strike?

The Fresno State student body (through the Associated Students, Inc.) passed a resolution less than two months ago, on November 29, supporting the requests that the CFA union is making of the CSU system to improve our compensation and working conditions. Thank you for your continued support of Fresno State faculty! We're looking forward to getting back to work once the strike concludes, and hopefully this is the only strike we will need to bring the CSU administration back to the bargaining table and negotiate an acceptable faculty contract.

Is it possible that the strike will not actually happen or could be ended before January 26?

In the at-this-point-unlikely event that the Union and Administration come to an agreement that ends the strike before January 22, or during the strike next week, then instructors will let students know as soon as feasible. Otherwise, the default expectation at this point should be that instruction will resume the week following the planned strike: 1/29-2/2.

Who can students contact about the strike?

Concerns about impacts of the strike on students can be directed to CSU administration:

Dr. Mildred Garcia, Chancellor: csu-chancellor@calstate.edu (and X: @CSUdrG)
Dr. Saul Jimenez-Sandoval, President: sjimenez@mail.fresnostate.edu
Dr. Xuanning Fu, Provost (Vice-President of Academic Affairs): xfu@mail.fresnostate.edu

This blog post will be updated as the story develops.

HyFlex: Pre-Class Experience, pt 1

One issue I've encountered, while considering how to provide equivalent experiences for in-person students (Roomers) and online students (Zoomers), is what experiences to offer before class begins.

For example, as Roomers gather and take their seats, they can chat with each other, and they can see that I'm present in the room and setting up for class. What do the Zoomers see? If I've just arrived, the students in the room know I'm present, but until I login to my computer and launch Zoom, the students attending virtually have no information about what is happening in the room. If I happen to be running late, the students in the room would be able to see that. So if class had to start late, they'd understand why - but the students on Zoom would just see the "Waiting for the Host to start the Meeting…" screen. They can't tell if I'm present but have forgotten to turn on Zoom, or if I'm in the room getting set up, or…

Then there's the similar issue of how to allow the Zoomers to chat with each other casually before class starts.

Here's how I'm addressing both of these. First, I've set up my Zoom meeting to "Allow join before host," so that the Zoomers can login at any point before I launch the meeting from inside the classroom. An unfortunate side effect of this is that, because I've also set up my meetings to automatically record to the cloud, I routinely have a student or two who join but forget to unmute, so the initial part of the recording is audio of them listening to salsa music, or watching a baseball game…and I have to trim that out of the video before posting it for the class.

To give my Zoomers a signal that everything is going according to plan before class starts, I've created a visual slide that I project (both through Zoom and also to the Room) as soon as Zoom launches:

Example before-class slide

This slide provides the current date, as well as a list of resources that all students (Roomers and Zoomers) should prepare to use during class. This is useful for students to do using pre-class time. Routine use of this approach will help online students understand when everything is proceeding according to plan before class is supposed to start.