Workgroup No. 9, Academic Visioning II, has nearly completed its final report for the April 14 vitalization project deadline.

The workgroup is currently working on formatting and stylistic edits and plans to send the final document to English professor Suzie Park for her to finalize and publish the report into a PDF document.

The report draft includes ideas the subcommittees presented on organizing academic colleges, differential tuition models and variable learning models during various town hall meetings this past February.

The workgroup has narrowed down its final list of recommendations to about seven ideas.

Those ideas include reorganizing the academics on the Eastern website; creating a task force to developed and establish a university college considering the reorganization of the structure of academic colleges depending on Eastern’s mission and marketing needs; encouraging, developing and enhancing interdisciplinary undergraduate and gradate programs; expanding the undergraduate online learning opportunities with necessary administration and staff support and resources; creating a task force to evaluate and implement a new academic calendar and to provide support to departments for sharing and/or providing tuition discounts and premiums where appropriate.

During the meeting, Workgroup chair, Melinda Mueller, a political science professor, said the report draft also included a Microsoft Excel spread sheet of the different colleges the group studied for people to see everything that was collected.

The tuition models portion will include tuition models and outline of national trends and issues from other institutions with similar systems compared to Eastern.

There were also additional suggestions regarding “prime time scheduling” to give students extra time to earn credits, reducing penalties for team taught courses and ideas about centralized administration units within colleges.

The final report was also said to include an evaluation and reaction from the feedback the workgroup received during the town hall meetings.

In the draft it said the workgroup reached out to the campus community through a “suggestion box” survey.

The workgroup has not set an official meeting date for next week, as the members believed they may finish the report before next Monday. However, Mueller said to keep an eye on the vitalization project webpage if plans were to change.

Angelica Cataldo can be reached at 581-2812 or amcataldo@eiu.edu.