Despite the cancellation of a formal meeting due to the blizzard, the Madison Initiative for Undergraduates Oversight Committee met via conference call Wednesday to begin finalizing the recommendations to be presented to the chancellor.
Aaron Brower, vice provost for teaching and learning, said the committee used the individual ranking compiled after the last meeting to create an overall score for each proposal in order to definitively rank the proposals.
The committee also discussed appropriate funding levels for the top 20 campus proposals, of which about 18 or 19 will receive a portion of the remaining $3.4 million in MIU funds, he said.
Brower said the committee would be gathering some more necessary technical details on specific funding requests in the coming days before making final recommendations to Chancellor Biddy Martin Feb. 15.
He added though final decisions have yet to be made, the top-ranked proposals include adding between 20 and 22 new faculty members and 10 or 11 academic staff to the university in an effort to provide increased access to high-demand classes.
The additional faculty will contribute to the MIU goal of reducing bottlenecks for these popular classes in hopes of allowing more students to complete a degree in four years.
He said a trend running through the most highly ranked proposals is the implementation of innovative teaching techniques that address the way students interact with information.
“Classes used to focus on conveying information to students, which is now less important than teaching them to navigate the sea of information we’re flooded with,” Brower said.
The oversight committee will try to meet again before the Feb. 15 meeting to finalize the recommendations.
While students sit on the MIU oversight committee and contributed to the final rankings, the student board will also submit a separate set of recommendations for Martin’s consideration.
Student board member Adam Sheka said students and the oversight committee agreed on rankings more in the third round of MIU proposals than in the past.
Sheka said the recommendations submitted by the student board would likely be similar to the recommendations made by the oversight committee.
He said students favor the proposals that allow for new undergraduate research opportunities, new equipment for departments and programs that will allow for more seats in competitive programs.
He added the proposals for additional faculty could add staff to the School of Journalism and other departments in Letters and Sciences, including political science and communication arts.
Though the decisions will not be easy, Sheka sais it has been rewarding to see the beginnings of success on a campus-wide scale among projects which received MIU funds in rounds one and two.
“It will impact the campus pretty widely across the board,” he said. “It should be hard to find a student that won’t be affected by the three rounds of funding.”
With the infusion of the MIU funds to campus, Sheka said a positive but unintended consequence has been conversations across campus about priorities and how UW approaches new teaching strategies.
