Senate Forum

On Monday November 10, 2008 Senate held a forum in which Seantors could come together and discuss selected topics. There were 3 brief presentation at the beginning of the forum on topics that could be related to the selected discussion topics for the event. I was a presenter at the event and spoke to the group about student evaluations.

Currently at Dalhousie there is a wide range of evaluations that are being used by students to evaluate their professors at the end of the semester. The Dalhousie Student Union would like to see a standardized section of the evaluation be created and used for all classes. We also want information from the evaluations to be available to students. Many other universities in Canada have standardized sections of their evaluations and have the information available (some just to students, some to just the university community, and some have the information available to anyone on their website).

The three selected topics for Senators to dicuss at the meeting were (1) learning and teaching, (2) research initiatives, (3) community engagement.

There was lots of great conversations that took place in each of the groups. The group that I sat in on was learning and teaching and here are a few of the conversation points we had:

- create first year interest groups (around academics)

- move towards service learning

- have more students participating in exchange programs

- have the opportunity for more Dalhousie students to participate in communities (within Nova Scotia, Canada, and globally)

- have faculty/student mentorship programs through student societies

- course capture (online lectures for students to access)

I was very happy that Senate put the effort into creating a forum where Senators could come together and openly discuss topics on how to make Dalhousie better for our current and future students.