By Megan Lambert (The Cascade/Photos) – Email
Print Edition: May 6, 2015
The UFV 2025 Visioning Committee came together April 28 to discuss their research, hoping to ultimately discover what students want from UFV in the next decade.
UFV 2025 is an initiative that plans for UFV’s future, with the goal of keeping enrollment high. The university has spent the last semester gathering data from focus groups and the tuition-free PHIL / EDUC 362 Philosophy of Education course, where students were encouraged to share their input. To finish off the Winter 2015 semester, the professors of these courses presented their classes’ findings.
Katherine Watson presented research collected from a series of student focus groups. She noted that students loved UFV for its flexibility and efforts for sustainability, but mostly had issues with parking, food services, over-regulation of clubs and associations, long waitlists, and opting out of the U-Pass.
One of the participants suggested the possibility of more doctorate programs at UFV; at the committee meeting, this suggestion was met by laughter.
Watson said some students were also unhappy about poor communication between them and UFV.
“They didn’t know what was going on until they were in their fourth year,” she said. “They weren’t aware of their opportunities, they didn’t know profs, they couldn’t figure out what was happening.”
Additional survey results included complaints about registration, although one member of the committee mentioned that UFV is developing a “registration task force” to address issues of long waitlists and course availability.
Professor of PHIL / EDUC 362 Jeff Morgan presented his observations about his class and their projects to the UFV 2025 visioning committee. The class was made up of 13 students from the arts, science, business, athletic, international, and indigenous communities, and Morgan noted that all of them were students with high GPAs who mostly liked UFV the way it was.
“From my point of view, I think many of the suggestions are on the conservative side,” he said. “They’re all really good students, they’ve chosen to stay here.”
Another committee member agreed, adding that to get more diverse opinions, UFV would have to research a little further.
“Both of these initiatives are fantastic, but the key thing that is consistent in both is C+ or higher, high GPA, and that’s a whole group of students that we’re missing that we have not accessed. That to me, as part of a committee, is a huge [sign] that we need to go out to those groups even more so, because they’re the ones who are going to tell us why they’re leaving and why they’re not,” she said.
Although Morgan says the students in his class like UFV as an institution overall, he did say that his group had some controversial ideas considering financial support for UFV, three-year degrees, and some problems with Institutional Learning Outcomes (ILOs) being too similar to one another.
Some of the PHIL / EDUC 362 students were present at the meeting and answered questions from UFV faculty and administration — most of which were directed toward their enjoyment of the class rather than the coursework.
“If students were more aware of the situation the university is in, and understanding both sides — of the perspective of the faculty [and] administration side as well as the student experience side — students would probably feel more of a commitment to the school,” one student from PHIL/EDUC 362 said.
Although the students present had a positive outlook on the 2025 initiative, the conversation among committee members did circle back to the fundamental issues of course planning and the academic calendar. Theatre department head Bruce Kirkley suggested that to create more flexibility among students and to ensure they graduate, perhaps the university could plan the academic calendar two or three years in advance — instead of just looking at the next semester.
“We could actually start charting them two or three years with a reasonable expectation that the course that you’re selecting will in fact be offered,” he said. “Is there something we can do in the university to make that kind of planning possible … in order to achieve that flexibility?”
President of UFV Urbanists Derrick Swallow, who also took the course, agreed, noting that having the information to plan in advance is helpful for students.
“It comes back to the disconnect between knowing what students want and what’s going to be offered. Both sides are missing information,” he said.
