Logistics: Enrollment and Registration

Find the Denison Registrar’s SLP courses for the spring 2017 semester here. (Accessible only for Denison faculty, staff, and students.)

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After meetings with Denison registrar Yadi Collins and Hope College registrar Carol De Jong and careful deliberations about how to best serve our communities including students, faculty and administrative offices the following best practices suggested themselves. Further discussion has since taken place including Oberlin’s registrar Liz Clerkin and Earlham’s registrar Stan Hill. The refined points are integrated with the initial discussion below.

General Overview

Courses offered by host instructors on their respective campuses will eventually be made available to all consortial campuses as space permits. For now, colleges engaged in the pilot project will share students. The initial pilot period for the Shared Languages program for Arabic involves Earlham College (Kelly Tuttle), Denison University (Hanada Al-Masri), and Oberlin College (Basem Al-Rabaa). For German it will be Hope College (Lee Forester) and Denison University (Gabriele Dillmann).
The first courses both in Arabic and German will go on the books in fall 2016 and be taught in the spring semester of 2017.
Courses offered in Arabic programs will be “Media Arabic” (300-level Arabic language) by Hanada Al-Masri at Denison and “Alienation in Modern Arabic Literature” (300-level Arabic Language) by Kelly Tuttle at Earlham. The partner campuses Oberlin, Denison, and Earlham each will share students in these courses.
Prerequisites for these courses: To enroll in this course, students must have completed second semester Intermediate Arabic, or have the permission of the instructor.
Students in all these courses and from all the involved campuses can furthermore benefit from a Globally Connected Course component in their host course.

Registration

Students taking a course at a host college program will find these courses in their home campus course catalog listing the title, a short description, meeting days and times, name of instructor, and credit hours.
The host campus registrar will likewise create a guest student record for each enrolled student with a minimum information aggregate about the student (name, home campus, SSN, email address, home address). The credits will be cancelled out in order to avoid double-crediting.
The final course grade will be submitted by the host instructor to the host’s registrar who in turn will submit the grade to the student’s home college registrar. This way, FERPA rules and requirements will also be adhered to. In the event that a student is disputing a given grade, the regular protocol of the host campus applies.
The student will follow the syllabus and course requirements (expectations, grading policies, number of credits, attendance) set forth by the instructor on the host campus. The meeting days and times of the host course apply to all students.
Each student will have a mentor on his/her home campus (in most cases their language faculty) who will communicate regularly with the host professor and check in with the student about his/her progress in the course.

Rationale for record keeping of guest students on host campus

Class roster – it is important that the host institution faculty member accounts for these students on his/her class roster, especially since the main reason for this program is to justify enrollments in classes.
Course evaluations – the faculty member would want to include these students in the semester end course evaluations (also the GLCA to evaluate the success of the program in general as well as the individual courses).
Reporting – both schools may want to report on students who are taking courses through this hybrid model. Furthermore, there may also be institutional reporting requirements for institutions that engage in hybrid/distance education offerings.
Institutional Policies – all enrolled students are bound by the policies set forth by the institution in which they enroll. If a student does not officially enroll, this cannot be enforced.
Communication between institutions – it helps with streamlining the grade reporting between institutions.
Having a record of “any” persons/students that are enrolled in our courses is essential. It is best practice in our registrar’s line of work. The registrar even records and enrolls persons from the community who only audit our courses.

Registration Form: There is merit in creating visiting student records and officially register “visiting students” in the courses. This will ensure that students appear on the class roster including the grade roster and also have access to institutional resources such as Library resources, Blackboard, and email, etc. The official enrollment will also bind visiting students to the “home institution’s” registration and grading policies, academic integrity policies, etc.”. This form does not have to be an elaborate form. It would only ask for minimum information in order for the host school to create their record. Denison is a Banner school and plans to create a special student record type, i.e. “SL” or “SLP”, for these visiting students, which will help coordinate things with various offices on campus such as Student Accounts, Financial Aid, and Institutional Research. These are some of the offices that need to be aware of this in order to account for and/or exclude these students from their processes. Furthermore, identifying these students with a special student type will also help the faculty member to know who the visiting students in his/her class are.

Oberlin Special Registration Form (sregistrar-16092115181)

Add/Drop Policy: Each student would have to follow the add/drop policies of the host institution.These should be included in the host instructor’s syllabus.

Grades: How will final course grades for “visiting students” be transmitted/communicated to the home schools? The thinking here is for Registrar’s Offices to communicate the grades and not make this a faculty responsibility. If students are officially registered in the course at the host institution, the faculty member can assign the grades the same way he/she submits for the entire class. And if the visiting students have a registration form and perhaps also a special record type, the Registrar’s Office of the host school would send the final course grade of each visiting student to his/her home school Registrar’s Office.

Our schools’ different academic calendars might present a challenge in cases where grades are needed ASAP–think graduation, academic standing, etc. Sharing calendars is essential to make sure there are no unpleasant surprises. For example, Oberlin’s calendar goes later than everyone else’s because of the winter term in January (Oberlin ten-year-calendar).

Anything that’s not graded in time for the respective school’s end of term processing, we would assign a “PR – in progress” grade, which is not included in the term or cumulative GPA and academic standing calculation. The time this could be problematic is when a senior takes a shared language course in their last semester because we collect graduating senior grades early in spring (Denison’s spring 2017 academic calendar: 2017-spring-semester-academic-calendar-dates-and-deadlines)

Credit Hours

The hosted student will receive the same amount of credit hours offered by the host instructor. The credits will be assigned in accordance with the host schools credits. For example, if a Denison student enrolled in a 3 credit course at Hope, they would earn 3 credits upon successful completion, not 4.
How will credits count/be recorded? Students have a course record at both institutions and potentially receive double credit entries, one at the host institution and one at the home institution unless we plan on entering it as transfer credits for our students. Since we are not going to enter it as transfer credits as we want our students to register on our (e.g. Denison’s) end for your courses to count toward their semester full-time enrollment credits here at Denison, it would be wise to zero out the course credits for all visiting students at the host schools once the final grade has been sent to the home school (depending on how it is recorded there).
We will want to reflect the student’s registration in the course so that they appear to be full time, can receive aid, etc. We won’t want to transfer the course; the host course will appear as an Oberlin course at Oberlin, a Denison course at Denison, etc. Will zeroing out the credits will be all we need to do? Perhaps as a host school, we might want to put a hold on the student’s record and not allow issuance of a transcript just in case. Another option: being a Banner School, you might be able to not “roll” the grade to Academic History–therefore no transcript could be issued? E.g., in the rare case where someone takes this course and then, sometime in the future, actually transfers to that host institution, how would their record look?

Costs

There will be no exchange of tuition costs. The student will pay his/her fees on the home campus as if it were a class offered there. This way, a student’s financial aid will not be impacted.
The rules of the home campus regarding limit of credit hours per semester apply.

Student Recruitment for Hosted Courses

The mentor/language instructor on the home campus will advise his/her students/advisees of the host campus/es course offerings and how these complement their studies at their home institution.
The host faculty will create informative and inviting flyers to be distributed among potential students on their home campus/es.
A specially created website will inform students and faculty of offered courses and information regarding registration and logistical details.

Access to Resources

A course webpage will be created for each offered course by the host instructor, containing logistical course details, syllabus, expectations, rubrics, reading materials, links to resources, etc.
Each student will be able to record, review, submit video material either from individual exercises or group projects. Google schools will make use of their Google drives, others may use alternative programs such as Dropbox.
Hosted students – just like on campus students – may choose to communicate with instructors and classmates via email, Zoom, texting, Facebook, etc.

Technicalities

These courses are not the equivalent of “distance learning or online” courses. On the most basic level, “distance or online” courses are defined as students not physically being in the classroom. These students will remotely via video-conferencing platforms join a physical classroom with students with whom they interact either synchronously or asynchronously in small student groups and will have direct contact hours (office hours, etc.) with the instructor.

Course Scheduling

Course Schedule Listing: How will/should we list the host institution’s “shared language course” on our schedule at our home school? Should we list them under one of our existing course number or should we create a “dummy” course with the appropriate level to identify shared language courses? I (Yadi Collins) am thinking that consistency here would be nice but is not critical. Every school can decide on what course designation (dept/number/section, etc.) they want to use as long as there is a comment/text on the course listing that identifies it as a shared language course and matches the information from the host school, i.e. course title, credits, day/time, etc.

I (Carol DeJong/Hope) understand the value of a shared course number but it could be problematic if our course number philosophies don’t complement each other. Additionally, this could be a problem for our degree evaluation systems and reporting. I’m in favor of each school decide on their own course designation and adding a comment or text to the course.

Denison’s spring course schedule will be available to students on October 17th, 2016. The spring schedule can be accessed on DU’s home web site at http://denison.edu/academics/registrar/registration-class-schedules/registration-class-schedules. Registration will start with seniors on Tuesday, Oct. 25, followed by juniors, sophomores and freshmen on the following three Tuesdays. When would visiting students be registered at our schools? Would they register after all students at the home school had a chance to register? For DU, that would be after Nov. 15, which is the date that DU’s Freshmen register.
The various institutions have different course grids, i.e. days and time during which courses can be offered or not offered. It is the combined efforts of the instructors by comparing schedules to choose optimal times for most students to be able to participate in a course. A student may at times need to reserve two slots of their home campus course offering times to be able to be participant in a hosted course.
For the spring 2017 semester, the following times have been determined as close as possible to being optimal for instructors and students:

Arabic

Earlham: Prof. Tuttle, Introduction to Arabic Literature, M/W 2:30-3:50, 3 credit hours.
Denison: Prof. Al-Masri, Media Arabic, T/F 3:00-4:20, 4 credit hours.

Registration Information: shared-languages-program-arabic

German

Denison: Prof. Dillmann, German 305, Migration von und nach Deutschland und Europa nach 1945 – Migration from and to German and Europe after 1945; M/W, 11:00 – 12:20, 4 credits (auf Deutsch!)

Arabic Co-Curricular (all host and hosted students) Experience during Spring 2017:

Students from all 3 campuses will meet in Dearborn, MI, for Diwan activities

Subject/specialized Courses to be development and offered in the near future in Arabic and German:

(Socio)-Linguistics

Translation

Cinema

Further Discussion Points:

Can we envision offering a Shared Course with a GLAA institutions? Yomna Chami from the American University in Beirut (AUB) made this suggestion and expressed interest in partnering up towards that goal.

Course Grids

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Course Grid Oberlin