At Wednesday’s University Council meeting, President John Peters spoke about Gov. Pat Quinn’s 2010 fiscal year budget and said that NIU could potentially receive $109.2 million.

This comes from general state revenue funds and is an increase from the $107.4 million that NIU received from the state in fiscal year 2009. Peters said that the money received from state revenues has served as “the base of [NIU’s] budget” for about the last 15 years. Peters said the total budget usually comes close to about $500 million.

“This is a good starting point after not being sure where anyone was on this,” Peters said of the release of the budget information. “I’d like to caution everyone that we still don’t know where this is going to end up.”

The University Council also voted on whether to switch from paper evaluations to online course evaluations. The council voted to permit online course evaluations but not make them mandatory. The decision to implement it would be either up to the faculty or the departments.

Efficiency and expediency were the main reasons for adopting this plan. The council also said that students would be able to think more critically about the questions, as time wouldn’t be as big an issue as it is currently with evaluations given during class time. The council also felt that it would relieve the staff members the work of typing up the evaluations and factoring the statistics, as this would be handled by the software.

Jeff Hecht, the associate dean of the College of Education, was in charge of a trial for the online evaluations last fall. He said that in the trial, faculty users of the software were able to add questions from the current evaluations or write custom questions specific to the course.

“It’s a very secure system,” Hecht said. “It worked flawlessly the first time out.”

Hecht confirmed that training is given to interested faculty and departments. The time period for when all online course evaluations would be enacted was also unclear.

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