There are going to be some changes at NIU this summer, and they won’t have anything to do with construction.

NIU will return to an eight-week summer semester equipped with a course line-up “consistent with the Priorities, Quality and Productivity process,” said NIU Provost J. Carroll Moody.

The decision to return to an eight-week semester comes after NIU faculty members expressed complications after last year’s summer semester, which was trimmed to six-and-a-half weeks in order to meet cuts in state funding, Moody said.

“The other issue that has come up about the summer session is the setting of certain courses as priorities,” he added. “We set priorities for departments to be certain that general education courses were addressed and courses that are ‘bottlenecks’ for students trying to graduate.”

Moody explained the process used by the NIU administration to determine which courses would be considered as priorities.

“Generally, the way summer session is dealt with is that colleges are given a certain amount of funds,” Moody said. The colleges split up the money among their departments and the courses to be taught are decided on the department level.

“This year there was a process where 50 percent of the funds given to each college in the past were given to the colleges outright,” he said. “Then we asked the colleges to solicit from the departments which courses they would give with additional funds. Whatever portion of the other 50 percent of the funds departments received was based on the priorities which the departments established.

“If we’re more certain that we’re offering courses like this in the summer we will have fewer students searching for the same courses next fall and spring.”

Moody also noted what he said he thought was an added bonus to the “bidding process” used to determine priority courses.

“We will be able to report to the IBHE (Illinois Board of Higher Education) that our summer session meets some of the reallocation targets set by the PQP process,” he said.

Those “priority targets” include increased attention from

graduate to undergraduate courses, as well as removing course bottlenecks which keep students from graduating on time.

In regard to how the process shifted money among departments, Moody said, “There was not a tremendous change in the reallocation of funds for the summer session. There were not any great winners or losers in this process.”

However, he added, “I think even if it (the process) did not produce any great change in the allocation of summer funds, it at least got colleges and departments to look at what kinds of courses they were offering for summer session.”

Moody said he was uncertain if NIU would continue using the bidding process for future summer sessions.

In addition, he said the Faculty Senate has an ad hoc committee to look at the summer session and he expects the committee will be called on to review the bidding process used this summer.

“I would expect that we would be assembling that committee and going over what our experiences have been this summer and soliciting from them advice on how things should go over next summer,” Moody said.