On Nov. 13, Student Government held their bi-weekly town hall meeting where they passed four allocation requests for three clubs, discussed Blackboard and how the audience felt about Blackboard and Student Government and what they can do to improve.
For allocation requests, Psi Beta was requesting $450 for a General Psychology tutoring session with meals provided in room 203 in Sneden Hall on December 7th. It was approved unanimously by the board.
The next allocation request was the GRCC chess club, which was $980 for one DGT Bluetooth chess board that is intended for any student to use and for any future events that might be held. It was a compromise for the chess club as they had requested $3,228 at the last meeting for two DGT Bluetooth chess boards. It was approved unanimously by the Student Government.
While the last two allocation requests were for the Yoga Club, it was $395 for a Yoga Club Christmas party event open to the entire student body, along with $150 for a wagon. It is important to note that there were no representatives for the Yoga Club and they have only attended one meeting in the past. Despite that, their request was approved unanimously.
Moving forward, Student Government had an interactive conversation with the audience about their feelings towards Blackboard and what could possibly be done to improve it, with some from the audience complaining about the site being too complicated and professors not even using it.
Nicholas Thomasma, the Communications Director, felt that the feedback was good, but no solutions were found.
“It’s very early in the conversation about the learning software,” Thomasma said. “All the feedback is valuable at this point and it sounds like there are general frustrations with Blackboard, so it’s worth looking into, but I didn’t hear any solutions that we were immediately called to explore.”
Despite that, Thomasma did feel the concerns of the audience were alarming.
“Some of the concerns were that teachers weren’t using blackboard, I find that to be disturbing,” Thomasma said. “Also, there is an issue that Blackboard doesn’t sync well and it has a bunch of unnecessary functions.”
Finally, Student Government also wanted the audience to talk about how the organization is doing as a whole.
At the next town hall meeting, there will be guest speakers Jeff Vanderveen and Amanda Kruzona to talk about Blackboard and to hear feedback from students about it.
The next bi-weekly meeting will take place on Monday, Nov. 27 at Raleigh J. Finkelstein Hall room 108/109 from noon – 2 p.m.
