Committee Meetings and Minutes

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eStaffing Committee

Meeting Minutes

Current Status of Minutes: Final
Date	May 1, 2017
Time	2:30 PM - 4:00 PM
Location	HBC 301.7

Members Present
Sue Bloodsworth, Andrew Christie, David Lauderback, Joe Lostracco, Norma Mercado, Gillian Waterston, Brandon Whatley
Guests Present
Alison Kwiecinski, Clark Shaffer

Item # 1:	Review of February 2017 Meeting Minutes
Presenter	Committee
Discussion	Approved. {gw; jl}

Item # 2:	Discussion about what to do with Declined Sections
Presenter	Committee
Discussion	The Committee is unanimously in favor of freeing up the course sections that have been declined by adjuncts. The Committee likes the idea of the declined course section being made available immediately after the adjunct professor declines an assigned course section. [Update: This was completed in August 2017] There was some interest in having additional functionality that either (a) prompted the adjunct to answer the question of whether he/she really means to decline the section, or (b) sends an email to the adjunct informing them that they declined the section and providing the date/timestamp of that request. [Update: No. Departments will need to reassign if adjunct makes mistake or changes their mind.]

Item # 3:	Discussion about what is meant by Senior Status
Presenter	Committee
Discussion	The question is whether that 'senior' status is independent of the academic department or not. Until IT receives an official interpretation otherwise, eStaffing will continue to compute 'senior' status independently of academic departments.

Item # 4:	Fall 2017 eStaffing
Presenter	Committee
Discussion	The complaints are as follows: (1) This is an on-going bug that needs to be corrected, but when adjunct faculty are looking at assignments on the 'Faculty Assignments' page, the 'Max Credit Allowed' value is not showing the maximum credit allowed, but is showing the total credits that were actually assigned. [Update: The source of the delay in fixing this problem is related to indecision as to how to handle the EIS sections.] (2) Slow performance on the eStaffing application when assignments are either being reserved (the day before eStaffing starts) or assigned. More than one department complained about this. IT will contact IT Systems to request monitoring of system on May 3, the last day of Phase 2 assignments. [Update: There was a sql indexing problem that was identified and fixed prior to Spring 2018 eStaffing.] (3) The AFA would like the 'day' trigger for section assignment acceptance/rejection changed from 1 to 0. This will ensure that adjunct faculty who are offered sections on the final day of section assignments receive the first of two emails alerting them to the fact that one or more sections have been offered to them. [Update: This was completed in time for Spring 2018 eStaffing.] (4) Because full-time faculty are offered a 2nd overload between Phases 1 and 2 of eStaffing, the Departments are anxious for the eStaffing sections upload to occur immediately after both Phases 1 and 2 complete. Therefore, the request is to automate the process to occur shortly after midnight on the final day of each phase of eStaffing, rather than be a process where IT AppDev requests that IT Operations runs the upload. [Update: This enhancement is 'in progress'. Is likely to be available for Summer 2018 eStaffing.] (5) Two departments complained that eStaffing is not picking up current Colleague data. (Since the Colleague-eStaffing download occurs on a nightly basis, the complaint is a curious one.) [Update: The source of the problem was identified and fixed in August 2017. It related to incorrect Section Meeting Times data.] *Per IT Analysis, the problem is related specifically to the processing of days and times. A date/time matching function may be at fault. IT App Dev will analyze further. (6) A request to modify the Draw Order report to only reflect the results after all potential section manipulation has been completed. This request was rejected on the basis that it conflicts with the intent of the Draw Order report - which is to provide transparency, and proof that the randomizing feature of eStaffing is working properly.

Item # 5:	Any update on MSTA Exception/Senior?
Presenter	Committee
Discussion	Unless this issue gets revived, the eStaffing Committee will no longer treat this issue as a relevant agenda item.

Item # 6:	Committee Membership Change
Presenter	Gillian
Discussion	Alison Kwiecinski will be replacing Gillian from now on.

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