Dear colleagues,

I want to bring your attention to some changes my colleagues in the Office of the Provost have been working on for months. We are implementing paperless processes for three key Office of the Provost activities this academic year: curriculum proposals, course evaluations, and faculty evaluation. These changes are timely, since we are all more reluctant to move stacks of paper around campus this fall.

• Curriculum proposals, that were due Monday, Sept. 14, are being coordinated on a platform called Coursedog, which automates form routing and workflows for Level I & II approvals and for Writing, Gen Ed, and Service Learning course approvals. We offered training sessions on how to submit curriculum proposals via Coursedog a few weeks ago. In addition, a new curriculum approval handbook posted on our curriculum website explains the current curriculum proposal process. contact Hadley Jackson if you have questions about curriculum proposals.
• Course evaluations will take place via Blue, the same online course evaluation program currently used by UMOnline and a few other academic units. This system will replace the IAS bubble sheets used by many departments. Tom McClintock is the contact for this effort, and will continue to provide information to department chairs/directors and academic unit staff over the coming months as we roll out this new system. We anticipate that fall 2020 course evaluations will become available to students November 9, 2020.
• Faculty evaluation will take place via Submittable. The Office of the Provost has engaged faculty association representatives and academic unit staff in developing this process. We were originally going to pilot this method with a handful of volunteer departments, but in light of the pandemic, with the endorsement of the deans, we decided to implement it campus-wide. We realize there will be bumps along the way as we move this forward, and ask your patience and feedback so that we can improve the process for future years. Visit our Faculty Evaluation website to learn more, and to sign up for information sessions and “office hours”. Claudine Cellier is the contact for this effort.

These changes were initiated by the Office of the Provost, but I want to acknowledge the significant contributions that others have made to these efforts:

• Camie Foos of Faculty Senate and Bonnie Pace in the Registrar’s Office helped design the curriculum proposal process,
• The administrative staff (or Academic Affairs Allstars, as I understand they are called) across the academic units and in deans’ offices have helped us test and improve the faculty evaluation process, and continue to provide critical information to help design and implement online course evaluations.

I want to thank these colleagues along with the committed efforts of the team in the Office of the Provost for their engagement and participation. We could not implement these changes successfully without these collaborative efforts.

I appreciate that these innovations, taken as a whole, may invoke a degree of apprehension associated with learning new ways of doing things using unfamiliar methods. However, UM needs to modernize its processes, and accelerating our efforts in moving to paperless methods is heightened by the current environment. Our colleagues have put a great deal of energy into using the resources at hand to make improvements that will have lasting effects. I am confident these changes will improve work efficiency, saving paper, time, and effort for staff and faculty this year and in the future.

Sincerely,

Reed