Re: Advice on Satellite Centers

[Sara Kimball <skimball@uts.cc.utexas.edu>]

Jane, hi.  At UT Austin we also have satellite centers open in the
evenings in the colleges of
Business, Natural Sciences, and Engineering.  Our satellite operations,
which our provost really wanted, were a bit slow to get off the ground,
but in their second year of operation all three of them accounted for
just under 2% of our business.  From your description of your situation,
however, you may not encounter some of the problems we did.  I've got some
more comments below.

On Wed, 9 Jul 1997, Jane Cogie wrote:

> I would like some advice about satellite writing center expansion. This
> fall we will be opening a small scale satellite writing center (a 27 hours
> schedule-- 4 afternoons and 5 evenings a week, with 2 to 3 tutors on duty
> at any given time).  It will be housed in a computer lab on the east side
> of campus near a cluster of dorms.
> 
> I have taken this step cautiously realizing that there may be problems I do
> not foresee (such as isolating the tutors from the ongoing give-and-take
> discussions that feed into the work of tutoring in the Center--where we
> have from 3 to 6 tutors tutoring during any given hour and plenty of "crew
> changes" to add to the mix; and then, of course, there are the bureaucratic
> detail headaches!).

Our people people who work in the remote sites normally also work in the
main site.  We also try not to have people working in the remote sites
until they've had some experience in the main site, and we've also tried
to team experienced people with less experienced people.  You don't say
whether your tutors are graduate or undergraduate students, but sometimes
grad students working on dissertations prefer evening hours.


  But it seemed time to institute evening hours (our
> current center is open only mornings and afternoons), and the dorm location
> is more suitable for that than our current location in an academic building
> which is fairly deserted in the evenings.  Having publicized the satellite
> center at the Dean's Council, I received a call from the Assoc. Dean of the
> Law School saying the Law School wants to fund a satellite center on the
> west side of campus, open to all students and to begin this fall.  I'll be
> meeting on Aug. 1 to discuss this possibility with the various powers that
> be.  I have already said that despite being interested in serving more
> students, I'm not sure it is wise to start up a second satellite before
> seeing how the first takes shape, yet we will meet on the 1st to discuss
> what each side has in mind, and when or if it will transpire.

Well, if the dean wants to fund it , why not?  Ours were conceived as a
way of placating some of the "big deans" on campus, since we'e funded by a
student fee, and they are funded off of our budget.  I'm assuming from
your description too that security is not going to be a problem if you're
open in the evenings.
 > 
> I would appreciate advice any of you might have on this issue--the
> advantages and disadvantages of satellite centers and the dangers of
> expanding too quickly (the latter are probably self-evident). I would, as
> you can perhaps tell, prefer to go slow and have been told that I am "in
> the driver's seat."  But the pressure of "an opportunity lost" to serve
> more students will be great.  So the more I know about what I am getting
> into the better.  (I plan to go to the library to look up past issues of
> WLNL and WCJ since I seem to recall an article or two on satellite centers
> that might be helpful.

I'd say go for it, especially if people are offering to fund it, but don't
promise results you don't yet know you can deliver in the first year. I
didn't separate out the figures from the remote sites in the annaul report
in the  first year, since they were tiny, but this year I have.  A dorm
might be a better location than the classrooms/computer labs we've been
using.  As always, publicity is very important. I think we have got to
push our remote sites even more vigorously next year, since we're
suffering from an over-crowding problem at the main site.

Sara Kimball
UT Austin   




> Sorry to be long-winded.  And thanks for any advice you may have time to give.
> 
> Jane Cogie
> e-mail: jcogie@siu.edu
> (618) 5494673
> 
> Jane Cogie
> Director of the Writing Center
> Department of English
> Southern Illinois University at Carbondale
> Carbondale, Il 62901-4503
> Work phone: (618) 453-6863
> E-mail: jcogie@siu.edu
> 
> 
>