By ALICIA FEYERHERM
Tiger Media Network
The Online Student Government Association (OSGA) met on Monday.
During executive reports, President Heather Flick said a discount code for online students is now available for the Victor E Apparel and Gift Co. Online students can email osga@fhsu.edu for the code, which provides about a 20% discount. Flick said she would work with Public Relations Officer Eileen Moore to distribute that code publicly to online students.
Moore gave an update on the Tiger Talk series that OSGA has implemented this year.
“We’ve been holding Tiger Talks, which is an online virtual forum that is trying to address what has been historically expressed as a lot of disconnection and isolation by the online community,” Moore said.
For the last Tiger Talk on AI, 40 people signed up to attend.
“With each successive Tiger Talk, I think we’re gaining more traction,” Moore said.
The Senate Affairs Committee has been working with the data collected from the online student survey.
As mentioned in previous meetings, the questions are all Likert scale questions to provide more quantitative data. The questions were based on issues that online students have historically encountered.
“We keep seeing the same issues, year over year,” Moore said.
Some of these questions include topics like outdated learning content and slow grading. At the request of the Faculty Senate, questions were also included regarding advising and Workday.
Moore reached out to the data analysis lab on campus to further analyze the data and break up the responses by college and department.
“Our next effort, once we get that deeper analysis, would be to identify the strengths and weaknesses and then maybe help facilitate departments sharing information,” Moore said.
Resolutions will be drafted addressing the issues outlined in the survey.
Once resolutions are passed out of the committee, the whole OSGA body will vote, and then, if approved, they will be sent on to the Faculty Senate Student Affairs Committee and then on to campus administration.
“Time is of the essence,” Moore said. “Faculty Senate is winding down. The school year is winding down.“
Flick said this process can be slow, but it will eventually result in benefits for the online community.
“There’s lots of great things happening in our direction,” Flick said. “ Just have to be patient, because, as most of us know, large bodies, large organizations, institutions do not move very quickly.”
The next OSGA meeting will be at 6:00 p.m. on Zoom on March 17. OSGA meetings are open, so for those interested in attending, reach out to osga@fhsu.edu for the Zoom link.