[Speaker 3] (0:00 - 1:02)
We're at 3.18. That was loud. Okay, so we're gonna call the meeting to order. And you hopefully all saw the minutes; they were attached to the meeting agenda.

They're also up here if anybody would like them to review from our last meeting in August. So I would like to see a motion to approve the meeting minutes from last meeting. All right, William.

And a second, Kathleen. Any discussion, questions, comments? Okay, a vote to approve.

Everyone say aye. Some other people have to raise their hands because I would like to review. Okay, thank you.

Any opposed? Okay, good. So meeting minutes have been approved.

We'll start with the reports from the officers. I have no report, Mark.

[Speaker 11] (1:06 - 1:24)
Just another call for the professional standards and responsibilities. I'm gonna be sending out some of the verbiage from the faculty assembly handbook and stuff so we can get a greater detail of what that responsibility includes, but still vacant if anybody is interested. Benefits, any announcements?

[Speaker 14] (1:29 - 1:33)
We have no announcements. We're kind of at a standstill right now, so.

[Speaker 3] (1:34 - 1:38)
Okay. Francisca here.

[Speaker 8] (1:41 - 3:23)
I just wanted to say that the application, again, for professional development, it is found in SharePoint under the excellence, right? The Center for Excellence is the new name. It does have two forms, and it can be confusing because one of them says professional development, right?

But that is if you are interested in offering professional development. That means if you're wanting to offer something and you wanna set it up. So the one we would need to go to right now, it reads as travel, application for travel for all employees.

That's what it reads right now. It might be changed. The name might be just so that we're not confused, you know, that that's the one we need to use.

But it is closed, of course. Right now it's closed until we have funds, of course. And it's also, I think it's ready to go, but they wanna test it before they open it up for us to see.

I feel like two major improvements I think to it is that now we will not need to have a supervisor sign it first before we submit, no? Once we submit is going to go directly to our supervisor, then that person signs it, and then it goes to, again, to the committee just to look at. And the faculty who applies can always track it.

That's also one major improvement and that we can now see where is our application, you know, we haven't heard anything from them, we can check, all right? So hopefully that works better. And I will be reaching out to the current members of the committee to see that they still want to serve for, you know, the next cycle.

And if not, I will reach out to see who wants to be part of that, all right?

[Speaker 13] (3:24 - 3:28)
Thank you. Honors and recognition.

[Speaker 2] (3:30 - 3:37)
Yes, at this point in time, we have nothing going. We're just getting started. So hopefully I have something more for you next time we meet.

[Speaker 3] (3:39 - 3:59)
All right, very good. We don't have anything in unfinished business. And I think we'll skip over in case Nicole or Rio are planning to come.

If not, I can give some information on what they were planning to speak about. But the next piece of new business is concerns about AI usage and honor lock.

[Speaker 13] (4:00 - 4:07)
So, hi.

[Speaker 1] (4:08 - 9:43)
So I wanna start by saying like, I have a concern that I wanna voice, kind of give a little bit of background about it. And then I have some proposed solutions as well. So it's not just a complaint session.

So I have been teaching on, been here for 28 years. I've been teaching online for probably the last 25. So this is not new to me, but I've been very frustrated with the solutions that we have for proctoring for the online classes.

There's a specific, we have three different options and there are specific problems with each one of them. The real kind of flying the ointment right now is the AI and the use of virtual machines and AI overlays, which get around most of the proctoring solutions that we have. Also AI agents that can go in and just take the test.

So we need to have some way of ensuring identity verification for our students. So that's like the main kind of concern. I've heard a lot of people say, students have voiced you, they're always gonna cheat.

So just get over it. And I say, yeah, that's true. But they were like cheating on like a couple of questions on a test or something, but now they're just whipping through the whole exam in three minutes and getting 100%.

So the level of cheating and the extent of it and the blatant cheating is kind of out of control. And so that's one of the concerns. The other thing is it's difficult to prove when somebody has done this using these newest tools like the AI overlays and the virtual machines, you can't see, you can't take a screenshot and it doesn't show them looking at their notes or hiding under their desk to try to look at their book because it's invisible to the recording.

And so it's been very difficult to me to even turn in academic dishonesty complaints because you can't catch them, but you can see them with their head on their hands during the video, when they're like taking the test, right? But I can't, I don't have any proof. So that's one thing.

The other thing is a lot of people say, well, don't give online exams, test for skills instead. And that works for some things, but the reality is that for our social science courses, most of the social science courses, the only learning objectives are content knowledge. And so you can't really give 500 assignments to test each little thing that they're supposed to be learning in the class.

That's what we run into in the social sciences is just the amount of material that's supposed to be just content knowledge. So here's my solutions, all right? These are just my proposals.

We really, currently the best solution for the problems that we are seeing is to use something called the Honorlock app. We have three different proctoring solutions. There's Honorlock with a Chrome extension, there's Honorlock app, and then there's Respondus, which is also an app.

The Honorlock app is the only one that locks down their computer so they cannot use a virtual machine or an AI overlay while they're testing. And it also has a second camera. They use their phone and they have a second camera so that can show what their hands are doing and then the screen.

The problem with that solution is that it cannot be used on iPads, which means that none of our dual credit students can use that. The other two solutions, the other two proctoring solutions, Honorlock with a Chrome extension can't be used on iPads. The Respondus can be used on iPads, but it is just as easy to go around as the Honorlock with a Chrome extension.

So the Honorlock app is something that we already pay for and we have access to. So that would be my preferences. If we could be told, yes, we can require students to use the Honorlock app.

As far as the dual credit students, how do we get them to be able to do that? Well, perhaps the college provides our online dual credit students with a laptop or what Regina likes to call a real machine. Real machines are required for anybody who takes classes is environmental science, physics, chemistry, stats.

They have to have a real machine. They cannot have an iPad. Lee college has loaner laptops that we could loan out.

I just talked to Paul, the wait list as of right now, before late start classes even start, we have 65 on the wait list right now. So we don't have that ability. The other issue that we could do is we could take the dual credit students that are enrolled in our classes and move them out to a standalone class on their own.

Because my students are mixed all in with my regular students. So if I pick, you can only pick one option per class. So if I pick Honorlock app, every single student has to do that.

So the dual credit students, maybe they are not enrolled in classes with other students, who we could then require to use the Honorlock app. The other option for those high school students is to give them paper and pencil tests that they are given in their test, in their school proctored by somebody at their school. So there are some options, but my issue is I think that if everybody signs up for an online class and wants to take it online, then we have this option where we can require them to use the Honorlock app.

And I think for right now, that would make most people happy, but we can't use the tool that we have because of the dual credit students. So that was the concern I wanted to bring forward to Faculty Assembly.

[Speaker 13] (9:48 - 9:50)
And does anybody else have any thoughts on, go ahead.

[Speaker 4] (9:51 - 10:42)
I was just gonna add to that, that another option we have is to do in-person testing. And so I've done that with some of my classes, require them to come into the testing center and test. And that puts everybody kind of on the same level.

I had some dual credit students who could not do that. So I'm giving them a pen and paper test. So with every class, it's like we're trying to scramble to meet the needs of the students, but also preserve the academic integrity of our courses.

I don't wanna certify grades and say students have these skills and have this knowledge when they don't. So we're all kind of facing this. How do we make sure our exams are verifiable and have that academic rigor for all students?

[Speaker 9] (10:56 - 12:36)
So I can meet with dual credit and we can have conversations with the school districts. One of the things that we've done recently is download what they needed onto all of the computer labs at the school districts so that they could go to the computer lab to test so that this wouldn't be an issue. And they did download Honorlock on those computers.

So I can check with Priscilla to find out what school districts have them, what school districts don't have them. I'll find out, I'll find out. I still credit.

The other thing I will say is the next best option for dual credit would be pen and paper test. It's pretty unreasonable to ask dual credit students to come to campus while some campuses are close, others aren't. And so asking the school district to pay for a bus to bring students in, not only is it costly for the school district, but they end up missing additional class periods just in the transition here and back.

So that's not a good option. When we're talking about traditional students, our students take online classes for a variety of reasons. And so anytime we're asking an online student to come to campus, we are creating a barrier that they may not be able to overcome.

If they have a transportation issue, if they have childcare issues, if they work full-time and they do their schoolwork at 2 a.m., we've now put up a barrier. And so while that modality is still a modality for Lee College, it is not a preferred option for an online course, just because we're creating a barrier that doesn't need to be there.

[Speaker 5] (12:49 - 13:20)
I believe it's just GCC ISD that has iPads. The other ISDs have Chromebooks, which is why originally we went to the dual solution of Respondus Lockdown Browser and Honor Lock was in order to accommodate our dual credit partnerships and what technology they had. But I do know from talking to Dr. Sanchez that they are trying to work to have all of the computer labs active for the students.

[Speaker 2] (13:23 - 15:49)
And I think everyone in this room knows when it comes to online classes, the cheating has been blatant, widespread, and extreme. And it is not fair to the students that are not cheating. Students are working as hard as they can and they're getting a C in the class.

Someone is blatantly cheating and getting an A in the class because they're getting 100% on their exams. And what I ask is I ask that this administration support faculty on this matter. Because to be honest, I question that.

There's been talk about doing away with on-campus testing. Faculty is not doing this because we're lazy. We're doing this because we also wanna support the students that are not cheating.

And it's blatant at this point. And there's different options out there. But again, it might sound like a general comment, but we need support from the administration on this matter.

Because what we don't need is the administration putting a barrier in front of faculty, trying to do our jobs where our students gain a quality education for years. This is my 32nd year here at Lee College. Lee College stood for a quality education.

And I don't know if we're going down the right road anymore with that. With issues with dual credit, with issues with online classes. What student wants to take a face-to-face class when they know they can blatantly cheat on an online class?

We are jeopardizing our face-to-face classes if we don't nip this in the bud with about the cheating that's taking place online. So I ask for administration's support on this matter. I don't ask for any rash, fast or haste decisions.

Committee needs to be put together. We need to study this matter, look at data, look at student outcomes on this issue. But it's not something we should just turn around because I hate to be rude, because it's a barrier to the students.

Cheating is a barrier to the students.

[Speaker 13] (15:58 - 15:59)
Other thoughts?

[Speaker 3] (16:00 - 16:05)
Maybe this is something that we bring to distance ed to maybe make a subcommittee to look at.

[Speaker 13] (16:05 - 16:13)
I don't know what thoughts we have about that. Oh, right. Including Jose for academic.

[Speaker 11] (16:14 - 16:44)
Yeah, I was gonna echo that to pick Jose's brain too, just from what he's seen in some of these occasions. And like I said, it's kind of, well, the reason I mentioned last time, if you have a chance to be on some of these hearings, getting what is going through some of these students' minds. Obviously, like we all know some students are just gonna cheat because they know it's an easy way.

But hearing from some of their students, again, there's no free pass for what they're doing, but trying to get an idea of like why they're making some of these bad decisions. But yeah, I would double say pick Jose's brain to kind of hear what he's hearing. So I got Dr. Ramirez now, I'll come back to him.

[Speaker 10] (16:50 - 16:55)
Perhaps we can have like discipline specific people on this committee as well.

[Speaker 3] (16:55 - 16:56)
Can you repeat that?

[Speaker 10] (16:56 - 16:58)
We can have, I'm just gonna hold it like this.

[Speaker 3] (16:58 - 17:00)
Yeah, you have to hold it really close.

[Speaker 10] (17:01 - 18:07)
Can we have like discipline specific faculty if there is a committee? The other thing is that there are faculty members in my division that are doing forward thinking with regards to AI, creating like an AI chat bot that has limited capacity of how students can interact with it and what it can do. And so I do think that while for sure, I wholeheartedly agree with what you said, there are other utilities to AI that might be beneficial.

And so when the committee is done, having discipline specific people involved, and then also to kind of like Dr. Langworthy of like quality matters, that people that actually like teaching online enjoy the rigor of it. Then maybe thinking about those faculty that just only teach those classes online because they enjoy the kind of rigor and they're creative with the kind of pedagogical practices that they do on there that might be, I hate the term AI resistant, but just thinking about the utility of AI in and outside that classroom, that might help think about ways to approach this problem.

[Speaker 3] (18:09 - 18:11)
Did you have thoughts, Cassandra?

[Speaker 13] (18:12 - 18:12)
Hold on.

[Speaker 4] (18:12 - 19:44)
I just wanted to add a comment to that because I spent May making my online courses for the summer as AI resistant as I could. And the summer classes which were online were very disturbing. Students were not opening the module at all.

They were not going through the exercises and said they were jumping right to the test or right to the discussion. And exams and philosophy were being completed in about five minutes with perfect scores. And the discussion posts, despite all my best attempts to make them AI resistant, personalize them, make them really specific, grounded in the material, they were still doing it.

They work and they're busy and they don't wanna be bothered when it's just a box they have to check to get the degree that they want or to get the job that they want. And I don't know what we do with that. We are an institution that is preparing students for the workforce and is offering that pathway for students.

But it's not the pedagogy. I mean, this was something I really worked hard on and thought it was pretty good. And I got feedback on it and they don't even look at it.

So that's my frustration with it.

[Speaker 1] (19:46 - 20:44)
I just wanted to make one other comment. I did mention to my face-to-face students this semester that I changed all my online classes. We're not using AI for anything in any of my classes.

The first year of college, the first semester or two is not the place for AI. They need to learn content, yada, yada, yada, the whole thing. And then I said, and I'm not allowing my online students to take online exams.

I said, they're all butts in seats in-person testing. And they literally clapped. My face-to-face students clapped when I told them that because they are in direct competition with the online students.

For the nursing program, they have to take both my classes. So the online students are gonna get into the nursing program because they have straight A's and they use AI all the way through. And the face-to-face students that are really trying to learn it are not performing as well because they're taking their exams in class.

And they know that it's not fair and it's making them angry. So I just wanted to throw in the student perspective.

[Speaker 5] (20:47 - 22:18)
So I'm just gonna say I had a completely different experience than Dr. Bell when I redesigned my course. It actually, last spring was probably one of the most joyful experiences I had in not being the AI police and in actually watching learning. So, I mean, I think that there definitely will be students who will cheat, but I also think that there are, the majority of students really do wanna do the work and learn.

How we deal with this conundrum, I agree with all of you in terms of we need to come up with a solution and we need to work together. But there are opportunities to move forward. And frankly, a lot of the literature I've been reading, universities and colleges are requiring that students have AI literacy, AI fluency and understand AI ethics.

They are, for graduation, because so many companies are requiring that students know how to use AI in an effective manner and they'll fail out of an interview if they don't know how to use AI in an effective manner. That doesn't mean that we should integrate AI in every single course or that I'm suggesting that we need to do that in any way. I'm just saying that we also need to be aware of that's a skillset that our students need as we move forward.

[Speaker 13] (22:25 - 22:25)
Is your hand up, Ethan?

[Speaker 3] (22:27 - 22:48)
Oh, okay. Oh, hello, Alex, welcome. So, what do we wanna do as a faculty?

Do we think bringing us to distance ed, trying to put a committee together, other suggestions from the group? Don't everyone jump at once.

[Speaker 11] (22:49 - 23:13)
I'll chime in and say that I think it'll be two different beasts with how dual credit is using it in main campus just because the iPads with Goose Creek are just a mess in general. So, I think addressing AI with them will be just a small part of a bigger technological problem that they got versus on campus where it's just, I guess, the bigger piece.

[Speaker 3] (23:13 - 23:30)
Right, and I think we have students, regardless of the modality, regular students that don't have access to a real machine as we call them. And so, I think we gotta figure that piece out. Did you have, okay.

Anybody have a recommendation of how we wanna move forward?

[Speaker 13] (23:31 - 23:39)
Oh, no. I think we need a committee.

[Speaker 2] (23:39 - 24:48)
We need a committee to study this matter. Not just the problem, but the solutions. And hopefully there's options when it comes to solutions.

Because I disagree with Laura's statement. I don't know if a majority of students really are, their priority is to learn this material or so, especially when it comes to these online classes. I have students texting me, asking me about the online classes.

They wanna know if it's proctored. And if it's not proctored, or if it is proctored, they're not signing up for the class. I don't think students want to cheat, but with today's technology, it's in their face.

It's easier for them to gain the tools to cheat. And I hope we have a responsibility to provide a quality education here. So I recommend the committee.

[Speaker 3] (24:48 - 24:57)
Okay, is there anyone in the room who wants to be on the committee so we can take note? Okay, Nicole. I don't know why, Hunter, I was like blanked.

[Speaker 13] (24:58 - 25:07)
I just talked to you like that. Cassandra. Javier, are you taking the, okay, okay.

Yeah.

[Speaker 12] (25:08 - 26:11)
Of course. In my experience, working with Honorlock has been incredible. So thank you so much for funding Honorlock.

I have had a great experience with them. Their IT team has helped me multiple times. They've helped my students.

The 24-7 assistance was online at 10 o'clock at night with a student of mine who was also emailing me, who was also online at 10 o'clock at night. And that was really, really great. So I think Honorlock has been a really great tool from my experience.

I would also say I have seen a lot of success with like multimodal assignment sheets. So instead of having a written assignment sheet, have a video. And so in that video, I explain what the assignment parameters are, what the assignment requirements are.

And that's something that's very, very difficult to AI. Of course, they can take the transcript, but whatever. It's difficult, right?

That's a barrier. So if anyone's interested or has any questions about that, multimodal assignments for my students, and then also for giving the students content multimodally has been really helpful for me. So, and I would love to be on.

[Speaker 3] (26:12 - 26:34)
Thank you. Yeah, and I think another piece of that as we go would be including, if we're going to require students to be proctored, we maybe need to come up with some specific course notes so that it's a very clear explanation to the students of what it's gonna look like. Because how can we require them?

I mean, if I live in Tyler or if I live in Liberty, it's equally inconvenient for me to come here.

[Speaker 5] (26:36 - 27:04)
So one of the challenges with course notes is that when a student, we learned this from Carl, because Dr. Champagne and I were emailing with him. Unless the student actually clicks into the class when they're registering, they don't see the course note. Now, I'm hopeful that Workday will improve this.

That's a couple of years away. But unless they can register without ever looking at the course note.

[Speaker 3] (27:12 - 27:35)
Or maybe we need to figure out a way that we present that very, very early in the class so that they still have time. Because at this point, it's almost too late to swap out to something else. Okay, so we'll be circling back to those people to see who wants to chair that committee and also reach out for other people, because I'm sure there are people who are not in the room who wanna be on it.

Any other thoughts about those things before we move on to?

[Speaker 13] (27:36 - 27:57)
Other business? Nicole? Thank you so much, Janelle.

I just wanted to take. Yep. We'll be changing topics.

Sorry.

[Speaker 6] (28:00 - 28:37)
So admittedly, as an institution, we need better guiding policies regarding the use of AI. We need comprehensive policies for the institution. So if I could add to the stated objectives for this committee is proposed language for comprehensive policies for the use of AI at the institution.

And we will consider that. We would like to, by the end of this fiscal year, to have fully adopted and approved AI policies for the institution.

[Speaker 4] (28:43 - 29:17)
But before we leave this topic, sorry. The Distance Education Committee last year did do some work on this. We have some documentation already done.

I know Dr. Lane Worley also did a full report on this, making some institutional recommendations and guidelines. It was very, I read it. It was very grounded in the research and very up to date.

So my point is some work has already been done that we can build on and see where we are in 2027. Excellent.

[Speaker 7] (29:18 - 31:07)
So for anybody who doesn't know me, my name is Nicole Tuenmeyer, Director of Guided Pathways. And I just wanted to formally invite all faculty to participate in our Pathways Fair coming up September 23rd and 24th. We've cut down the number of sessions we're doing this year.

So we're just doing 930, 11 and 1230. Thank you, Chanel. And so I have a great email that I'm sending out to all of the faculty who are leads in your areas.

But for some reason, IT is blocking my emails. And so you're not getting those emails. So be on the lookout for that email.

It is gonna be shorter notice because I'm having that IT issue. They were supposed to go out last week and I'm still dealing with IT issues. But September 23rd and 24th, 930, 11 and 1230 are the three times.

So go ahead and check your calendars. If you're like, oh, I wanna participate, sign me up. You can send me an email and I will just sign you up.

But be on the lookout for that email and we would love to see you guys there. We had incredible feedback from fall kickoff for the faculty who came and had conversations with students and Pathways Fair is just another opportunity to have those conversations and help students clarify their decisions about their career choices. And so be on the lookout for those emails or send me an email and I'll sign you up.

So thank you.

[Speaker 3] (31:11 - 31:47)
And you're also more than welcome if it fits into your schedule to bring your classes. So if you have class at that time and you'd like to bring your students, do that too. Okay, Rio is not here, but he did wanna come and let everyone know that the TRIO office is willing to come out and present the program to your classes if you all are interested.

They're recruiting students for the upcoming, for this year and then also for next year. So maybe he'll come to the next one, but I do know he's looking forward to meeting with more students to recruit TRIO students. And then that takes us to the president.

[Speaker 6] (31:57 - 33:48)
All right, so just a few announcements and updates. First, we are two days away from the census date for the semester. Right now we have 9,600 students on the rolls with just over 90 that have yet to pay.

And so even if we lose all 92 of those students, we're still looking at ending our official enrollment records at around 9,500 students. So that's excellent news. We're very excited about that.

The institution has never been over 9,000 in any semester before. And so fantastic news there. Most of the growth is with dual credit and with our Huntsville enrollments.

Next week during the board meeting, we will be getting a facilities master plan update from Pfluger as a workshop prior to the board meeting. So if you come at five o'clock, you'll get to see all of the updates that they have from the ideation phase. I would invite all of you to come and watch that.

There'll be pictures and illustrations of many of the ideas that they've been discussing. From this point moving forward, now the ideation is really coming to a close. It will really focus on planning and prioritization.

We'll start to build out the schedule and the projected prioritization of all of our projects with regard to our facilities master plan. And then finally, some of you have mentioned to me potential concerns with drag pool investigations and.