Unfinished Business —

Sunita Gandhi, committee chair, presided over the meeting.

Today’s agenda is about going through the word document that Hollie, Hara and Patricia prepared.  It is the survey, and Sunita said we need your feedback. Sunita shared the document on the screen “Discussion on Needs, Concerns, Resources Sought, and Challenges of International Students Survey”. She thanked Patricia, Hollie and Hara for their hard work. 

Sunita congratulated Charlie for the new title and said we appreciate all that Charlie does for international students. Charlie thanked Sunita and the group for their help.

Charlie provided comments. Abbreviated demographic information is stronger than the first draft, which would have provided identifiable information. This is good in that it gives us some broad demographics. The questions at the end, I don’t think jobs off campus is relevant to international students as it is off limits for them, unless certain issues are present.  On campus wages is all right. If there are broader challenges students are facing that KU could facilitate conversations, those should be included. It’s important to have conversations on global issues for support and programming.

Charlie doesn’t see a problem with students skipping questions.  They may want to refrain from something, which is fine, as we are not getting statistical. He likes the changes that were made.

Sunita said for the text box it is good to have a limitation, as people can put too much in there. What is the limit? She suggested 100 to 150 words. Wyatt said it might be nice to have a place where people can reach out to.

Wyatt suggested that those students who want to talk more about an issue forward questions to the governance box. These questions will be sent to the international affairs committee. Wyatt agreed with Charlie’s comments. Also, requiring students to answer all the questions, may result in some students not submitting.

Hara said if they don’t want to respond to subtopics, it’s on the survey.

Wyatt said it is good to ask about things that even though we can’t change, the departments can provide support, such as emotional support.

Sunita talked about the reasons to include the libraries in the survey.

Charlie talked about 5 and 6, strengths and weaknesses. He appreciates the broad scope of this. This creates a nice open framework for students to mention challenges they have with KU at large. Thank you for keeping this broad. We can cast a wide net in terms of experiences students have.

Y-Yang asked how the students will receive the surveys. By email and from which office? Charlie said it will go from committee to ISSS, Dr. Eron Memaj’s office. ISSS can send out a blanket email to all international students on behalf of the committee. That is probably the best option. Yi-Yang asked if the faculty would receive the link so they can encourage students. Yi-Yang, gave an example of a recent survey he took part in. The survey asked the pertinent questions up front, and the rest of the questions were optional. We could do this:  ask pertinent questions and then suggest they answer the rest if they have time. Also, a paper copy would be good.

Hara plans to share the link via social media.

Sunita said students should be aware there is something out there and we are sending the survey. She asked if there is a time limit to complete the survey. Hara said there are none for the actual survey. Sunita asked for time limit to gather responses. Charlie said that a couple of weeks would be good. We should send a reminder mid-way. It should be complete by Spring Break. AIRE should approve it the week of the 15th. It would go out on February 20th. The deadline would be March 6. It's before midterms.

Julius asked about the process. Would we expect through the approval process that the survey is revised?

Charlie said Institutional Research will review and it is possible, though he doesn’t see anything in the survey to cause this.  He does not see anything on the calendar that will AIRE conflict with this survey.

Julius asked if they do change, do they provide feedback to as why it is changed? Charlie said he doesn’t know.  Hollie said they worked as a group, the three of them, and they have received feedback from Charlie. Feedback won’t be a problem, as it will be group feedback. 

Yi-Yang asked if students can save this as they are working on it. Hollie said she thinks you can do this in Qualtrics. Wyatt said you can’t do in Qualtrics unless they sign in with KU ID, which defeats the purpose of being anonymous.  Hollie said last year this was possible. We signed in.

Sunita asked if it was fine to send the recording to Patricia. No one opposed. Charlie said that if the committee is thinking that some other organization build this in Qualtrics, this will take some time.

Hollie thought the plan was for us to build this. Hollie thinks the survey will take 6 or 7 minutes to take. Charlie thinks we got about 170 responses last time. Hara thinks the survey is quick and straight forward.

Yi-Yang is glad to know it was done two years ago. What came of it? Is someone responding to this? Hollie is thinking about the one they did about Covid two years ago. The response back is that ISSS can use this to make the campus better for students.

Charlie wants to underscore the power of this committee. This committee will generate a final report with recommendations. We can think about how to supply support for a specific need. The other piece of that is more persistent challenges can go into the charge for next year. I want to underscore how useful this is for international advocacy.

Julius thinks from a DEIB perspective, it helps to know that someone is asking these things, it gives you hope. That is a big deal.

Sunita asked for any other questions. Next steps? Subcommittee will compile with all the suggestions. Hollie said what we did in the past is to put it in Qualtrics and have the committee take it and see how long it is. Once that is done, we will evaluate it and then send it on.

This needs to be out, well before spring break.

Sunita:  How can we get jobs on campus? Sunita gets questions in person.

Timeline:  Get this out to students on Feb. 27. Hollie, once it’s built in Qualtrics, we can give the committee 24 hours to do this.  We could do the turnaround in a week. We could have it done by Feb. 17th. We just must input info in Qualtrics.

Sunita said f you can send to some faculty or all faculty, which would help. They should be aware IA is doing this for students.

Hollie said once it goes out to ISSS, we can let the deans know so they can notify the schools.

Charlie said that Sunita, as a chair, could send message to provost to disseminate to the deans.

Sunita asked Hollie and Hara if they will send Qualtrics to us and put in Teams. They agreed.

Sunita asked if hyperlinks in Qualtrics is allowed. Hollie said yes. It is important that a student be able to link if they need specific help. Then suggested a couple of more important hyperlinks.

Charlie is thinking about the comment on prioritization of questions. On the one hand, I want everyone to answer strengths and weaknesses, I really want that. The other questions…. prime them for this one. You want the questions you really want answered should be upfront.

Somewhere in the communication when you are talking about issues, you can provide hyperlinks to resources.

Meeting adjourned.