The Transcript

The Issue: Ebola

The first case of Ebola has been confirmed in the United States. A man from Liberia tested positive for the disease in Dallas, and the BBC reports that 50 people the man, Thomas Duncan, had been in contact with are being monitored for signs of the virus. The only other cases in the country were of medical professionals being flown here for treatment.

There have been other suspected cases of the disease besides Duncan. The New York Times said there was a suspected case in Washington, D.C., where a patient who had been in Nigeria was isolated at Howard University Hospital but was eventually determined to not have the virus. Another man who flew from Brussels to Newark Airport went to the hospital with Ebola-like symptoms.

With this influx of Ebola cases, the Obama administration “believe(s) that screening of passengers in the affected countries in Africa, by taking their temperature and requesting information about their activities, is the best way to prevent the virus from spreading to the United States,” the New York Times reported.

It has been rumored Duncan knew he had the disease and did not file the proper documentation while flying from Liberia. According to the BBC, Liberian officials said they would “prosecute Mr. Duncan for lying on an Ebola questionnaire form.”

The BBC reports the disease has killed an estimated 3,400 people in West Africa. There have been 7,178 confirmed cases, most in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea.

The Issue: ISIL

On Friday, ISIL released yet another video of militants apparently beheading a hostage, this time a British man named Alan Henning. This is the fourth hostage the group has killed.

Henning was a former taxi driver in Britain who was “moved by the plight of the Syrian people,” the New York Times said. The BBC reports Henning was on his fourth aid mission to Syria in December, when he was kidnapped minutes after arriving in the county.

Along with the beheading, the militants threatened American hostage Peter Kassig, whom National Security Spokesperson Caitlin Hayden confirmed the militants were holding, the Associated Press reported.

Kassig, a former Army Ranger, was travelling through Syria working for the relief organization he founded, Special Emergency Response and Assistance, when he was captured in October of 2013, the AP reports. While in captivity, Kassig converted to Islam. He now goes by Abdul-Rahman.

Ohio Wesleyan University is allowing prospective students who have above a 3.0 grade point average apply without submitting ACT or SAT scores. Director of admission, Alisha Couch, said this is the second year OWU has had this policy in place, but this year the GPA requirement is dropping from 3.5 to 3.0.

One argument in favor of forgoing test scores is that standardized tests don’t accurately represent a student’s aptitude.

Vice President for Enrollment, Susan Dileno, said she feels standardized test scores are outdated and the process no longer treats students equally.

“It’s really not fair when you have lower income families that can’t afford expensive test prep and to take the tests multiple times,” she said. “The SAT/ACT was created to make it fair for all students applying to college, however that’s not so much the case anymore.”

While the new admissions process is aimed at providing applicants with a fairer shot of acceptance, the move to test optional is also an attempt to help with OWU’s low enrollment problem.

“Of course, there are obvious marketing benefits to telling applicants whose GPAs are above a 3.0 that they don’t have to submit standardized test scores,” said Dileno. “But that’s not why we’re doing it.”

Couch agreed, adding the point that colleges are business as well.

“As much as we hate to think about it as a business, it is one, and so this is obviously good for marketing,” Couch said. “But it’s not the main reason we decided to not require test scores.”

Couch agreed that, statistically, lower income families don’t typically do as well on standardized tests. She believes that foregoing standardized test scores if the student’s GPA is high enough will give the university a better picture of a student’s ability to perform in college.

“More and more schools are realizing that foregoing the test scores for applicants with high GPAs is actually improving the diversity of the student body without sacrificing the quality of the students,” said Couch. “Denison University has been doing this successfully for years, so that gave us confidence that, if we did it, we would still be admitting quality students,” she said.

Dileno said the standardized test scores are not a priority of OWU when looking at a prospective student’s application to OWU. The decision to waive the scores, therefore, does not complicate the admissions department’s role.

“When we’re looking at a student’s application, the high school GPA is the thing we look at most to tell us how a student will perform their first year in college,” Dileno said. “It shows how hard they worked, their motivation, and the types of classes they chose to take, which gives us a pretty good idea of how they’ll do in college.”

Dileno said the lowered GPA requirement is an attempt to apply the option to submit test scores to a greater pool of applicants.

“Last year, only 100 applicants out of 4,000 met the criteria to make them exempt from the standardized test score requirement,” Dileno said.

Couch said OWU’s new semi-test optional admittance process is likely to take a while to catch on.

“It’ll probably be a couple years until guidance counselors in high schools, and college guide books are made aware of the fact that we’re test optional,” she said.

As Ohio Wesleyan administrators discuss several large projects to rebound from this year’s enrollment decline, the university’s Board of Trustees largely deferred to them on how to move forward at its full body meeting Friday.

The trustees took one vote after two days of discussing salient campus issues in committee meetings, but that vote was a concrete step toward funding some of those big projects, such as the Student Housing Master Plan. It set a $200 million goal for the university’s seven-year capital campaign.

About $50 million of that has been raised so far in the campaign’s three-year “quiet phase,” during which administrators are soliciting donations but not publicly advertising it, according to Board chairperson Thomas Tritton. He said that number includes the combined $16 million in donations funding the Merrick Hall renovation and the forthcoming Simpson-Querry Fitness Center.

The largest portion of that money would go toward financial aid to make OWU more accessible to prospective students,  Tritton ’69 said. The rest would fund building projects such as Merrick and Simpson-Querry and student housing improvements, as well as academic goals such as hiring new faculty and supporting curricular initiatives such as Course Connections.

“It’s really student-oriented,” Tritton said.

What those student housing projects will look like, though, is still uncertain. OWU administrators have not yet told the Board what the Student Housing Master Plan, which has been in the works since 2011, should prioritize or set a timeline for its component projects.

The Board’s Student Affairs Committee wants to move forward “prudently but quickly” on student housing, committee chair Ed Haddock said. In his report, Haddock mentioned some results from a student housing survey that indicated students care as much about the facilities they live in later in their time at OWU as they do about where they live the first year.

The forward motion on the capital campaign comes at the same time as a smaller freshman class than last year (484 students versus 569) and as a 1.2-percent drop in the percentage of students staying at OWU after their first year, according to a Sept. 4 email from University President Rock Jones to the faculty. Those issues make this fiscal year “more of a challenge” than the last, which ended with a small surplus and with the endowment at an all-time high of $215 million, according to Finance Committee chair Jeff Benton’s report.

“We are at a time when we have challenges, but we have extraodinary momentum and strength to address those challenges,” Jones said in his report to the Board.

Online courses could be the future of Ohio Wesleyan’s curriculum. This month, a faculty focus group assembled to assess the idea, focusing on the fact that offering this additional course structure could provide revenue for the university.

The ability to take courses online would only apply to the summer school sessions. According to Provost Chuck Steinmetz, the principle advantage in online summer courses is that OWU could take them without the additional cost of housing and loss of income from a summer job.

“I don’t think our goal would be to generate more revenue as much as make it easier for students to complete their degree in four years,” he said.

Steinmetz said there is interest among the faculty on hybrid learning, which would allow classes to incorporate both online and in-class participation, and some professors on campus have already begun offering hybrid classes during the academic year. Online summer courses are designed to enhance the experience of OWU students needing to catch up on course work.

“My goal in offering on-line courses in the summer would be to help students who have fallen behind in their academic plan and allow students to complete more than one major during their four year period,” Steinmetz said. “This is consistent with our philosophy behind offering the summer school option.”

According to Richard Leavy, professor of psychology, this would allow students who, for a variety of reasons, cannot come to campus for classes to “benefit from our knowledge and pay for the privilege.”

Since online courses require little infrastructure from the university, “the cost of offering them may be rather little,” he said. “The number of people registering for an online course could conceivably be greater than in one of our classroom courses, so on balance, it would be financially beneficial, although it depends on how much the student pays and how many enroll.”

Online classes are not unique, but they would usher in a new era for the university. Large state schools have been offering internet-based distance learning as an education option for years. In fact, beginning in the early 2000s, it was possible to earn an entire degree online. However, Denison, Oberlin, Wittenberg, Kenyon, Wooster – have yet to incorporate these types of classes into their program.

However, according to President Rock Jones, technology is reshaping much of American higher education.

“Technology has changed every aspect of the way we communicate and the way we gather information and grow our knowledge base,” he said.

Students and faculty alike seem torn between the pros and cons of online courses.

“In general, I agree with those who say that we should focus on doing what we do best: provide an excellent educational experience in the classroom,” said Lynette Carpenter, professor of English.

“We have a strong faculty of classroom teachers, and those kinds of teaching skills don’t necessarily translate into good online teaching.”

Leavy agreed stating quality as his main concern.

“If the knowledge gained by students is the same, if faculty members derive the same outcomes including: pay, student relationships, and their own intellectual growth from offering online courses, there is no appreciable downside,” he said.

“What I don’t know is how to insure such a level of quality.”

Ohio Wesleyan students currently have the option of taking online courses from other institutions and transferring the credits – a process junior Bridget McQuaide described as “a huge hassle.”

In this respect, students would benefit from having the option to take OWU sanctioned online courses. According to Jones, introducing online courses as an option for students wishing to take classes over the summer is also an option.

“Some have suggested the benefit of summer course offerings utilizing technology so that students can complete OWU coursework while participating in internships, completing undergraduate research, offering volunteer service, or engaged in other important activities while scattered across the country and around the world in the summer,” he said.

McQuaide added she believes this option would provide opportunities for students to take courses over the summer who are at risk of not graduating on time and need to re-take a class from home.

The main concern related to online courses is that the format could detract from the OWU experience.

“I believe that the OWU experience includes the personal treatment with faculty, the residential halls communities and other aspects that would be missed through online classes,” said junior Lautaro Cabrera, who has taken online courses in the past and said  he had difficulty finding them engaging.

Both Leavy and Carpenter said, while they believe their courses could be translated to the online platform, they are hesitant to do so.

“I’m not motivated to transform them into online courses,” Carpenter said.

“I’m still working to improve my ability to stimulate good in-class discussions and devise good active learning opportunities, especially through group problem solving.”

While the idea of offering online courses is still in it’s infancy, Jones said he believes it deserves full consideration.

“I remain convinced that the residential liberal arts experiences finds its greatest value in the direct interaction among students and between students and their teachers,” he said.

“Technology can support that fundamental interaction, but it cannot replace it.

“Ohio Wesleyan has the opportunity to explore innovative ways for utilizing technology to enhance teaching and learning on our campus, and I am eager to see where the conversation leads.”