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The Academy has always had to find the right way to balance its fleet and department duties. At the time when there were three to four ships, it made sense to have additional admin support on the fleet side, with other members of the Academy staff being able to divide their time between the fleet and department responsibilities - this led to the creation of the Assistant Fleet Liaison Officer (AFLO).

We are now down to a single Academy ship. At the same time, there is a growing interest in using current Academy department resources to help with a renewed interest within the club. A re-alignment is needed in how the Academy uses available resources (which in plain English, means where we need available volunteers and experience). I am therefore planning on making two changes this term to the Academy staff organization.

First, I will be officially eliminating the AFLO position (which hasn’t been filled in a couple terms now). I will post a mandate to make this official at the same time that I finalize the mandate for the discussion below.

Second, I want to create a new position dedicated for supervising the courses. I envision this position having the following responsibilities:
1) Overall supervision of the content of all of the courses, and approving content changes
2) Ensuring tutors remain active
3) Making recommendations to the ACmdt for new tutors or replacement tutors
4) Making recommendations to the ACmdt for new courses (or to remove a course)
5) Ensuring standardization of exams and grading for courses at similar levels
6) Preparing graduation certificates, etc. and ensuring the graduation list is updated
7) Marketing and promoting the courses

I envision that the person filling this position would generally not change from term-to-term, and instead, like an Executive Assistant, would be expected to keep the position until they stepped down or the ACmdt felt a replacement was needed. This is to balance against the term-to-term replacement of the ACmdt/VCmdt, and to ensure that a clear understanding of the courses is preserved from term-to-term, and that projects that may take longer than a term (such as a course re-write) can be worked out without risk of a changeover of the people working on that.

What does everyone think about this? Are there proposed responsibilities that should be added or removed? Any concerns about my thoughts that the person keeps the position from term-to-term?

So just to put my thoughts in here at this point Dan. I like this position idea, but to play devil’s advocate a moment are these duties which could for the near future be broken up among the Cmdt and ACmdt? There by eliminating the need to fill the role at all, short or long term? In this way over the rest of this term and/or the next we could have a full discussion to fill in any other thoughts/ideas to round out this future position.

Now regardless of my above question I’ll follow it with another thought in support. Like I said I do actually like this idea, having someone who is able and willing to hold the role term after term with a long term eye to helping the tutors update course material say would be a BIG boon for me. For many terms now I have been trying off and on to update the engineering course with sadly little success due to many factors. That said its not been the end of the world as I don’t recall having to grade a test or receiving one since I think about mid-2019? Maybe earlier....

Beyond the above listed ideas for this person to fill I do like having a consistent vision for all the courses, and a standardized format to grade and all. As it is now or even in the recent past before some of the courses got updates the material presented was kind of all over the place. So having this consistency I think would be welcome.

Also taking suggestions for position titles. Currently I have “Head Proctor” but that may be a bit boring.

So has for a name? To be honest I’m terrible with these suggestions maybe Course Proctor? In honesty I don’t care what its called long as it makes sense so I leave that to those far more skilled then I.

(I would like to keep this discussion focused on the position rather than the courses themselves. After this position is filled, we will resume an older Command discussion about what the goals, etc. are of the courses.)

Daniel Lerner
Academy Commandant

All of this stuff can be basically summed up as “the Commandant’s job.” Why can’t you do it, exactly?

I don’t really buy this argument of “we need to have someone permanent because of too much change over every term.” It could apply to the entire Academy. Except that’s silly to do, because the whole point of having the Academy be a cabinet position is that we can establish some form of accountability over whether or not people are present and actually doing it. When the club is broken that only happens once every eight months for the cabinet jobs, and never for the non-cabinet jobs.

EDIT: Just to expand on the above, the Academy has a Commandant and a Vice Commandant, and an AFLO if they appoint one, and courses were typically handled by the Commandant, or the Vice Commandant if someone delegated the work to them. The argument you yourself put forward is that we don’t need an AFLO anymore because the Academy overhead is less than it used to be. If there’s less work to do, then we don’t need more people to do it.

Unless your response is that the Commandant and the Vice Commandant have failed to manage courses. I would counter that by saying the President (read: You, at least some of the time) failed to keep the Academy accountable for doing that work and appointed people who were absent and had no interest in doing it. We shouldn’t be inventing more jobs so that people who have been doing nothing can continue to do nothing.

Joe

So maybe I am mistaken on what you are saying here Joe so forgive me if I am wrong here. But from your words I took your above comments about holding the various Academy positions responsible for updating and grading courses. To me to my understanding it has always been to those who grade the courses to do so. Then given over to the Commandant to get them uploaded say to TECH for the library.

While I like the idea and, like Jerome, would have great interest in filling it, I am inclined to agree with Joe (at least to some extent). As far as I’m aware, the Academy Commandant doesn’t oversee a lot apart from cadet placement and reinstatement of GMs. Any other responsibilities are few and far between.

However, despite that being a sound argument, I get the feeling it’s been said before, as I’ve heard things about the courses needing a major update for over a year now. Yes, it might technically be part of the Commandants job, but we can say that all day long and it won’t change the fact that the work’s not getting done for some reason or another. Maybe a new position is necessary, even just a temporary one designed for course revision. Alternatively, the Vice Commandant position could be eliminated/transformed into this new Academic Dean-esque role.

Gavin

The Commandant has a lot more responsibilities than what you claim Gavin. There’s more to running the Academy than just placing cadets and reinstating GMs (which we actually don’t do as far I know, that’s the GM department), I’d be happy to discuss them at length, but I don’t want this discussion to devolve into a discussion about what the Commandant does all day.

I think, at least, in the interim, this position could assist in upgrading the course textbook. It’s a big task as I’d argue most of the courses need an overhaul (some minor, some major). I’m presently working on the CO course as I’d like to see it be graded more on the test taker’s ability to troubleshoot ship management problems rather than regurgitating facts from the course. That will take time because I am a volunteer and I don’t have unlimited time to devote to such a pursuit (I have to pay my bills just like anyone else after all). Also, making the course more “situationally based” may enable it to require less frequent updates, at least that’s my aim.

As a course tutor, I never have issues returning graded courses in roughly two weeks (if there was a delay, I always let the course taker and the Commandant know). Changing the course to make timely improvements takes a lot more energy.

I would argue that the question is whether or not the Commandant can realistically manage the demands of the course textbook (ie: getting those much needed upgrades done) with all the other responsibilities of the role at present? I’d argue, it could be too much, at least right now. Just a little food for thought.

An addition, I suppose I see this as maybe more of an “evolution” of the AFLO role. The original intent of the AFLO was to assist the academy staff in monitoring the ships to ensure nobody was going horribly AWOL and that things were running smoothly (which typically involves a bit more than watching the master roster, I always would read the ships to where I had a pretty good idea of what the crew was presently doing in relation to the main simm, when I was Commandant for example). When we had four ships, it certainly was a heavy workload. Not so much anymore with just one ship.

-Kat
Vice Commandant, CO Course Tutor

So getting to this point of the discussion, I have to agree with Kat, there are alot of behind the scene things that the various admin staff for the club do that is not always obvious or seen for one reason or another. Having held a few FComm roles which to me are similar to the Commandant just not quite as in depth, I can say supporting multiple ships much less one ship like in the Academy even there can be a time taker, added that the Commandant and their staff need to set the standard for the Academy experience to new cadets it can in my view be a handful.

Again we all need to be mindful that all of us who hold admin roles in the club only have so much time to do so. This goes up and down the chain of the club if you ask me, the fact we have less and less people term after term stepping up to learn and hold these roles means that there is a constant struggle to fill roles with qualified people because often now those who are qualified have held such spots so much they are burned out. Obviously this is a multi-pronged problem all over the club with many reasons it is happening. But let’s not get off track for the point of Dan’s discussion.

To sum up in my opinion overall I agree with Dan’s idea. For the pros of things having someone able to hold it long term after term setting a constant agreed standard and vision for the courses as outlined above makes sense to me and longer term helps ease a burden on future Presidents and Commandants etc. On the Con side I would say obviously there is the question of ‘who’ fills this role? And hence my query at first asking if the Cmdt/ACmdt cant in the short term do this work? So to follow that up what if we follow through on the idea and are unable to get anyone to fill this role to begin with? What do we do then? Added on this how do we handle when say the first person to fill this role steps down or maybe vanishes without a trace from the club 1+ terms down the line and again are unable to fill it? Again what then?

Those are my thoughts on this and questions Dan. I hope somewhat they have been helpful!

Robert Archer