The podcast of the October 11, 2019, College Senate meeting is now available on the College Senate's podcasts web page. Podcasts serve as the official audio record of each College Senate meeting.

From the Chair of the College Senate
The next meeting of the College Senate for fall 2019 will be held Friday, November 8, at 3:00 p.m. in Bulger Communication Center 423. The meeting agenda will be posted on the College Senate website on October 31. Please direct questions to Vincent Masci, assistant to the College Senate, 878-5139.

The enrollment period for the 2020 Productivity Enhancement Program (PEP) is now open and runs through Friday, November 15. PEP allows eligible CSEA, UUP, PEF, and M/C employees to exchange previously accrued vacation or personal leave for a credit toward their biweekly New York State health insurance costs. Sick leave credits cannot be exchanged under this program.

To participate, eligible employees must file an election form with the Employee Benefits Office, Cleveland Hall 410, by November 15. Eligible employees will receive information and enrollment forms via campus mail. Details and enrollment forms can also be found on the Human Resource Management website.

Employees who participated in PEP for 2019 must file a new election form to enroll in the 2020 program.

Please call the Employee Benefits Office at 878-4821 with questions regarding the program or enrollment.

Please join us for the professional development workshop "Using Influence Strategies and Approaches to Attain Your Work Goals," presented by Mike Cardus, leadership and organizational consultant, on Thursday, November 7, from 10:00 a.m. to noon in Chase Hall 109.

To complete your tasks at work, you must depend on other people (many of whom you do not have direct authority over) to supply you with the necessary information to complete your work on time and on budget, and to ensure a quality product or outcome. As you work to complete a project, goal, or task, you must sometimes influence multiple people with different roles on and off campus. Influence can be defined as the use of personal energy to create an impact on, redirect, or change the outcome of a situation; the same influence approach does not work with everyone. This workshop will help you to learn a variety of influence approaches (or strategies) and allow you to identify how to choose which approach will be most effective.

During this workshop, you will accomplish the following:

• Understand five influence strategies and determine when it is best to apply each.
• Learn how to develop profiles for those you need to influence and how to alter your approach to increase the odds that your idea will be heard and accepted.
• Share stories of how you have influenced others and what worked and did not work; listen to and learn various influence approaches from others' stories.

Light snacks will be provided. Please register through the Workshop Registration System.

Please join us for the data analytics lecture "Text Analytics and AI for Marketing on Social Media," presented by Drew Fones, head of consulting services at rel8ed.to Analytics, on Thursday, November 7, from 5:30 to 7:00 p.m. in Bulger Communication Center 425.

Learn more about the data analytics programs at Buffalo State and about Drew Fones's work. He will discuss how rel8ed.to Analytics gathers unstructured data, maps it against social media, and uses that data to target the right audience for a given product. In other words, he'll help us answer the question, "Why do certain ads show up in my social media feeds?"

For more information, please contact Joaquin Carbonara, professor of mathematics and director of the SUNY PSM Consortium, 878-6423.

Please join us for "Thinking Spring 2020: Reusing, Revising, Remixing OER," a webinar offering a rapid review of open educational resources (OER), demonstrations of editing OER courses in Blackboard, and an overview of student success data and continuous improvement with OER, on Tuesday, November 12, from 2:00 to 3:00 p.m. Watch with colleagues in Butler Library 314 or participate online via Zoom.

OER can deliver immediate benefits to you and your students in terms of cost savings, immediate access, and innovative pedagogy. If you are using or test-driving OER courses, this could be a great time to dig deeper into the following:

• Customizing your open courses and taking back control of your curriculum
• Filling in gaps in your learning content
• Learning more about how OER and combined learning technology fosters student success

Please register through the Workshop Registration System by noon Tuesday, November 12.

The webinar is sponsored through a collaboration between the Teaching and Learning Center, Instructional Design and Training, and Butler Library as well as SUNY OER Services and Lumen Learning.

Please join us for the webinar "Using OER for Student Success" on Monday, November 4, from noon to 1:00 p.m. Using open educational resources (OER) offers several immediate benefits to you and your students, including breaking free of the restrictions of commercially published textbooks and learning materials, the reduction or elimination of textbook costs, and meaningful assignments permitted by openly licensed materials and open publishing opportunities.

The webinar offers an overview of OER, an introduction to “ready to adopt” general education OER courses available in SUNY, and the pedagogical benefits of using OER with a focus on personalized learning and continuous improvement. Bring your lunch to Bulger Communication Center 120, where we can watch together, or watch online via Zoom. And bring a friend!

Please register through the Workshop Registration System by 10:00 a.m. Monday, November 4.

The webinar is sponsored through a collaboration between the Teaching and Learning Center, Instructional Design and Training, and Butler Library as well as SUNY OER Services and Lumen Learning.

Please join us for this workshop to discuss the Institutional Review Board process on Tuesday, October 29, from 12:15 to 1:30 p.m. in Chase Hall 109.

Before the review process, researchers must be sure that their project is, in fact, research with human participants as defined by the federal government. To qualify as research with human participants, the following must be true: (1) The participants must be living. Thus, oral history projects fall under the guidelines, but research involving diaries kept in the 1800s does not. (2) The project is a systematic investigation; that is, it is designed to be a study. For example, instances in classrooms where teachers ask students’ opinions on the material to gauge progress are not research; however, if that same teacher designs a study to evaluate two methods of teaching the material to see which is more effective, this would be research if the third criterion is met. (3) The project is designed to contribute to the generalized knowledge. To qualify as research, the person conducting the project must intend for it to be disseminated at some level.

On our campus, we also review student projects that may not be disseminated but that meet the first two criteria so that our students will learn the process of research with human participants and because we have contracted with the federal government to do so.

Please register through the Workshop Registration System.

Join your community-engaged colleagues for some fun and networking at Campus House on Monday, November 18, from 4:00 to 6:00 p.m. This is an informal opportunity to talk about your community engagement, learn strategies and ideas from others, and hear from the CCE staff about new initiatives and opportunities. Most importantly, it’s a chance to get to know colleagues from across the campus. Light refreshments will be served, with a cash bar available.

RSVP to Laura Rao, director of civic and community engagement, by Wednesday, November 13.

Please join us for an interactive session, "SUNY's Urban-Engaged Institution: What It Means in Your Classroom," on Wednesday, October 30, from 3:00 to 4:30 p.m. in Technology Building 258.

Buffalo State classrooms can incorporate civic and community engagement opportunities that meet course learning outcomes and connect to community priorities. This session will help faculty and staff members who are new to community engagement as well as those who could use a brush-up on community-engaged learning and the practice of incorporating a community-based project into a course.

Topics will include

• an overview of the theory and practice of community-engaged learning,
• strategies for identifying reciprocal and meaningful community partnerships, and
• a discussion of effective methods of incorporating student reflection to connect the community experience to course learning.

Please register by e-mail.