News Bulletin 4, November 10, 2017          

Cont Ed Teachers’ Special Meeting
You are invited to a special meeting to address the specific concerns of Cont Ed teachers over wine and cheese:  4:00 pm – 6:00 pm, on Thursday, January 25, 2018.  (We chose this time, in particular, since classes for Cont Ed will not pose any conflict as they begin Jan. 29th).  We hope to hear from you.

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College Committees with Teacher Representatives
We have now filled many of the committees for 2017-18.  Thanks to all teachers who put their names forward to participate in committee work so as to ensure teacher perspectives are informing the direction of College initiatives.

Professional Development
In an effort to facilitate our teachers’ use of our professional development funds, we would like to let you know that 1) deadlines are important: you must submit your Application form before the event and you must submit your Expense Report after the event; 2) highball your “amount requested” on the Application form: so that the amount claimed on the Expense Reports will have already been approved; 3) we have made a proposal to the Administration  to make the College Policy on per diems more flexible and the Administration is considering the proposal.

Quality Assurance: Global Perspective
The ‘Quality Assurance’ vision of management has become an integral part of the process of evaluation in higher education worldwide.  Problems can be seen, in the UK, for instance, where Quality Assurance principles inform a new assessment process called the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF). It is an audit that universities and colleges are now being subject to by an external agency under Ministerial auspices to assess “the quality of teaching.”  This has nothing to do with excellence in teaching but rather the management of educational institutions since the TEF will be used to determine funding to institutions.  The danger is that this approach favours centralized, hierarchical decisional processes, instead of the collective input from teachers, as the experts in education.

Contractual Obligations
In our Collective Agreement (Article 8-4:01 -Type 1 activities), there are a certain number of tasks that are considered “contractual obligations” that all teachers are expected to do, from tenured teachers with lots of seniority to brand new non-tenured teachers. The most important duty we must perform is teaching our full courses, but know that holding office hours and attending department meetings are also notable contractual obligations.

See our full articles on our website, for day teachers:
http://www.thevcta.qc.ca/2017/03/02/contractual-obligations/

And Cont Ed teachers:
http://www.thevcta.qc.ca/2017/04/06/1811/

For the full list of contractual obligations, see our Collective Agreement, Art. 8-4.01:
http://www.thevcta.qc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/2015-2020-Convention-Collective-FNEEQ-2015-2020-EN.pdf

Changing Your Medical and Dental Insurance Coverage
Contact Human Resources for any change you may want in the insurance coverage modules during the month of November.

Coffee Mugs
Please kindly return any common mugs you may have to the lounges as our stock is presently quite low.  Thank-you!