Barometer The Daily
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2012 • OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY CORVALLIS, OREGON 97331
DAILYBAROMETER.COM
VOLUME CXV, NUMBER 90
PAGE 8
SPORTS
8 – Gymnastics’ scoring 8 – Club sports: Tennis
NEWS
6 – Students win tax competition
FORUM
4 – On school shootings, how to address and prevent the violence 4 – Prisons, immigrant connection
STUDENTS: Thursday night parties conflict with basketball games.
Change has come to the MUPC
Student fee committee approves MU budget n
Questions raised about childcare subsidies, healthcare fees during meeting By Don Iler
The Daily Barometer
neil Abrew
| THE DAILY BAROMETER
At a meeting held on Friday in the Memorial Union, MU President Ashley Barnes spoke in front of the Advisory Board. The meeting led to a vote that decided the president and vice president positions will no longer be elected by students, but hired. n
MU Advisory Board voted Friday to remove MU positions from ASOSU general elections By Drew Wilson-McGrath The Daily Barometer
On Friday, Feb. 24, the Memorial Union Advisory Board voted 7-to-3 in a decision that will result in the removal of both the Memorial Union president and vice president from the Associated Students of Oregon State University general elections ticket. The positions will now be officially vetted through a hiring process to be later determined by Advisory Board officials. Four weeks ago, the topic was brought up to the Memorial Union Advisory Board regarding whether the vice president position should transition to director of Memorial Union Program Council and hired based on a particular skill set, as opposed to running alongside MU presidential candidates via the
ASOSU General Elections process. The initial discussion revolved around the vice president and their respective role as a member of the MU organization. For the last few years, the position of vice president had been solely involved with the affairs of the MUPC, acting as the head of that particular organization. Members of the board felt as if the position title and job description needed amends in order to better reflect the actual duties of the position. Queries had also risen among members of the board regarding whether the MU president should still be selected by the student body, or also moved into a hiring process to be determined by Advisory Board officials in the future. “We currently have 18 members on the Advisory Board, including myself,” said current MU President Ashley Barnes. “Of the members, there are five professional faculty that serve in ex-officio, non-voting positions; three directors, two atlarge MU Professional Staff representatives and 12 voting student
members.” As chair of the Advisory Board, Barnes can only cast a vote in the event of a tie. Despite the fact that only 10 of 12 voting members were present for the meeting last Friday, the vote generated by those present represents a significant change for the future of the MU organization. “Two weeks ago [the advisory board] made a tentative decision to move both of the positions out of elections, and vote for the president’s position through an open selection process of some sort that is yet to be determined,” Barnes said to members of the Advisory Board on Friday. The vote was originally intended for Friday, Feb. 17, but was delayed for the second time in two weeks because members of the board wanted more input from students both inside and outside the MU before making a final decision. The responses from students and faculty were limited, mostly consisting of the opinions of student mem See Positions| page 7
Sarah gillihan
| THE DAILY BAROMETER
Barnes was elected as president of the Memorial Union last academic year. She made claims to recent efforts to be inclusive of student opinion in the decision to remove the positions from general elections.
Two new courses in spring require attendance only half the time n
With two new hybrid courses available in the spring, OSU looks to accommodate more students in new class format By Amanda Antell The Daily Barometer
With the growing number of students on campus every year, the Oregon State University main campus and Extended Campus have come up with an alternative solution. A form of hybrid courses is being introduced to OSU this spring term. The spring term hybrid courses are considered trial runs to test efficiency and accessibility. Hybrid courses are half in the classroom and half online. Enrolled students are required to show up to class for half the required class time of a normal lecture class, and most of the material is available online. Unlike a normal Ecampus course, a hybrid course will not cost the students extra money or fees. This trial is meant to show if more students can be accommodated. With this system, two classes can use the same room, in the same time slot in which one class meets Tuesdays and the other meets Thursdays. There will be two hybrid classes available this
spring and eight this fall. For spring term 2012, PSY 202 and ENGR 213 will be available as hybrid courses and for summer 2012, FOR 241 will be available. For fall 2012, H100 and WR 327 will be available as hybrid courses. The classes selected were purposely picked due to their popularity among students, how they cater to different majors and whether or not it was a feasible option, i.e. if the classes could be taught in this type of schedule. “Hybrid courses offer the best of both face-toface learning and online learning, helping students with many learning styles. Hybrid courses also offer students a more flexible schedule, which can help with other courses or jobs, etc.,” said Professor Sara Jameson, senior instructor of writing, and assistant director of writing. Jameson is offering her WR 327 course as a hybrid, and is quite confident in its forecasted success. “Our writing classes usually already use a large web component for such activities as discussion board posts, online peer review, or online assignment submissions. When trying to decide which of the writing classes to pilot as a hybrid, we thought technical writing was a logical choice because of the content, and the fact that so much workplace writing is created and shared online
now,” Jameson said. Cub Kahn, director of the Teaching and Learning Center, is in charge of the Hybrid Pilot program at OSU. “The Ecampus Task Force recommended in 2011 that OSU move forward with the development of hybrid courses,” Kahn said. While Kahn reminds everyone that this is a pilot project, and the results will be unknown until the classes are actually completed, he is confident based on results other universities have attained. In particular, the University of Central Florida has a developed hybrid program, and has higher academic success rates. Professor Charles D. Dziuban of Central Florida is the chief proprietor of the hybrid program at the University, and has been a great reference to Kahn and the other chief developers of this project. “This year’s Hybrid Course Development Pilot Program is small, but within three to five years I anticipate that OSU will offer many undergraduate courses in a hybrid format,” Kahn said. The development of this program is coming from Academic Services and will not be collected from the students at all. Kahn and other project leaders are confident in its success. Amanda Antell, staff reporter
737-2231 news@dailybarometer.com
The Student Incidental Fee Committee met for its final budget presentations prior to the open hearing on Thursday, March 1 in the upper classroom of Dixon Recreation Center last night. The committee heard presentations from the Student Parent Advisory Board, the Memorial Union and Student Health Services. While all three budgets were tentatively approved, the committee requested further information from the Student Parent Advisory Board and Student Health Services before fully approving their budgets and decision packages. The Student Parent Advisory Board presented their budget first. The board is responsible for funding Our Little Village, which provides drop-off day care service for students at the library and for a childcare subsidy awarded to help alleviate the cost of childcare for student parents. Approximately 60 to 70 students receive the childcare subsidy every year and Our Little Village employs seven student employees. The board presented two decision packages. The first would increase the amount of subsidy money provided to student parents. The goal was to provide enough subsidies to students so that no student pays more than 10 percent of their income in childcare. Currently, the board estimates that students pay on average 22 percent of their income in childcare costs. The decision package would increase the fee by 47 cents, and the board proposed increasing the fee gradually over the next five years in order to meet the goal of childcare costing only 10 percent of income. However questions were raised about whether it was the student body’s responsibility to pay much of the cost for student parents. “I’m not sure if it’s 91 percent of the student body’s responsibility to help pay for the costs of nine percent of the student body,” said Senator Crystal Boyd, a committee member, referring to the estimated nine percent of the student body that are parents. The current maximum subsidy for childcare awarded to students is $383 per term. Childcare in Benton County for newborn children on average costs $1,000 a month, which results in the subsidy only covering a little over $100 a month in the cost of childcare. The second decision package would be to establish a similar drop off day care service at Dixon Recreation Center for parents to use while they use Dixon. The package would result in fee increase of 28 cents per student per term. It would also create a half time classified position to work in the office, to free up the professional faculty to work at the Family Resource Center and the childcare centers. However, the committee called into question the budgeting board’s large $360,000 remaining fund balance. The majority of this fund balance apparently came from a 1998 referendum that students passed in order to construct a student childcare center. The fund at one time was as large as $600,000, but had been used at various times since See Committee | page 3