Chaparral 2021-2022: 30.3 Governance Tidbits

Governance Tidbits

by Frankie Strong
Governance Office Coordinator

Are you Zoomed out? Too many Zoom meetings? Well, don’t shun it just yet. Let us celebrate how Zoom has provided us with an opportunity to make our meetings better, easier, and more efficient to meet and collaborate. And Zoom has brought us closer in ways we didn’t expect.

How many meetings do you attend per week? Per day? By now you may have some favorite well-run meetings. Great examples that I have observed are the College Executive meetings, the Academic Senate meetings, CSEA Chapter meetings and the Guild membership meetings. Here are some highlights of innovation and collaboration at its best:

• Having a chairperson who keeps the agenda moving, allows respective discussion, and is aware of raised hands is a meeting worth attending. Thank you Dr. Viar!
• Having a Zoom team to help run the meeting. This means having one member look out for raised hands, and another to keep track of the chat and keep a queue so that all members have their turn on the discussion floor. Thank you Roger Dickes and the Academic Senate. Thank you to Narbeh Nazari and the CSEA Leadership!
• Providing attendees with guidelines on meeting etiquette with clear meeting protocol ensures that an order of decorum is maintained. Thank you Emily Haraldson and the Guild Exec!

I am confident that there are many well-run meetings occurring each week. Can you identify several efficient and effective practices which you’ve observed in the meetings which you attend?

Zoom provided us with the means to collaborate “face-to-face” when we couldn’t be together on campus. Other Zoom tools that help us are the share screen ability, polls, and breakout rooms. It is cool that we can save the chat as a file. I really like the usage report to correctly produce an attendee list; this ensures that no one is missed. Some meetings, such as Institute Day for classified, and faculty Institute Day were recorded to reach a larger audience.

Speaking of larger audience, remote instruction has provided learning adults the convenience to virtually attend classes – in addition to Canvas. We reach more learning adults, and attendance is higher and more consistent – students have requested (begged) us to keep this mode of delivery for now and moving forward. This has been my observations as an adjunct faculty member in the Adult Basic and Secondary Education (ABSE) Department at the Garfield campus.

How about those realistic virtual backgrounds that show a very well organized and decorated home office? Personality – we each have one, and many of us show it in our own private ‘square’ or ‘Brady Bunch’ square as some of us call it. Be it a virtual background or a true glimpse into our home – presuming our bandwidth is up to par. Zoom has a personality of its own as well.

There are Gremlins in the computer (if you know what a Gremlin is, then you know), or maybe it is a glitch in the Matrix? (I think I just dated my ol’ self). Were you lucky enough to experience some sort of glitch or weirdness when using Zoom? Such as the following:

Pixelated images of your Zoom group.

Your Wi-Fi cutting out in the middle of a presentation?

Or you’re speaking quite eloquently only to be interrupted by someone telling you that you are muted.

Ah, the quirks and triumphs of virtual meetings.

It was a bit rough at the beginning when we all were thrown in to this Zoom world. Just as we got used to our smart phones, we got into the groove with Zoom. Thankfully we didn’t need our nine-year-old relative to help us figure it out (ok, maybe that was the case for some of us).

We did it! Covid created some challenges which we have overcome together – because that is what we do at GCC, we prevail together. Thank you to each of you for participating in governance and for all that you do. Thank you.