Phase 3: March 2 – 12:01 am

Phase 2: January 3 – 12:01 am

Phase 1: December 18, 2021 – 12:01 am

Fleming Licensed Software

Work to Rule SWF Guide

Phase 3: March 2 – 12:01 am

Sample Letters

Removing grades from D2L

Phase 2: January 3 – 12:01 am

Phase 1: December 18, 2021 – 12:01 am

FOCUS

• The imposition of terms and conditions prevents the possibility of good labour relations, eliminates faculty consent, and is itself a form of labour disruption.
• It is a choice by the colleges and the CEC to abandon negotiations and to force faculty to work only under the conditions the colleges and CEC want.
• All actions below specifically target administrators, not students.

CONTINUE TO…

• Focus on needs of students and supporting their learning
• aintain contact with students and keep them informed
• Maintain contact with Local and attend union activities and meetings
• Follow explicit written direction from your manager (and talk to your Local about how to file a grievance if necessary).

ACTIONS (All faculty Professors, Instructors, Counsellors, Librarians, FT and PL)

1. Many Colleges are in the process of changing their instructional delivery plans in January, as a result of COVID. If your college has made changes to your workload or your instructional delivery mode since you received your SWF:
   • Request a meeting with your supervisor regarding any changes to workload and or delivery modes since you received your Winter SWF and ask for additional attributed hours for preparation, to reflect the additional time that you will need to spend preparing as a result of these changes.
   • At that meeting, request a written response from your supervisor within 48 hours.
   • Follow that meeting up with an e-mailed summary of your meeting and repeat the request for written reply
   • If you receive no reply in 48 hours (or if you receive an unsatisfactory reply at any time, including verbally), immediately refer your workload to the Workload Monitoring Group. Contact your union Local for any questions.
2. Start recording all of the time you spend on the different parts of your work, such as evaluation, preparation, meetings, student email, etc. We recommend using Toggl, a free and easy to use app that you can use from your computer or phone.
3. Change the signature line on your college and personal email to read:
   “The College Employer Council and college management have chosen to impose terms and conditions of work on college faculty, rather than agreeing to extend existing terms while the faculty and employer bargaining teams negotiate a Collective Agreement. College faculty have begun a work-to-rule campaign, in protest. For more information, click here collegefaculty.org.”
4. Share the Following Sample Message on your LMS and social media:
   “The College Employer Council and college management have chosen to impose terms and conditions of work on college faculty, rather than agreeing to extend existing terms while the faculty and employer bargaining teams negotiate a Collective Agreement. College faculty have begun a work-to-rule campaign in protest. For more information, click here collegefaculty.org.
   College faculty are fighting for the following, for students and the college system. The Colleges are refusing:
   • More time for student evaluation
   • Preparation time for online learning
   • Partial-load job security and seniority improvements
   • No contracting out of counsellor and other faculty work
   • Faculty consent prior to the sale or reuse of faculty course materials
   • Jointly-led committees and round tables able to implement changes around workload, equity, and Indigenization, decolonization, and Truth and Reconciliation
     
     If you would like to send a letter expressing your concerns to the President of the College and the CEO of the College Employer Council, there is a link to a sample letter at collegefaculty.org.“
5. Sign the click-to-email letter at collegefaculty.org and distribute it to students via non-college email. Share it with friends, family, colleagues, other organizations you belong to, and ask for their support.
6. Upload as little as possible for the upcoming semester on college LMS platforms.
7. Do no work over the scheduled holiday period. For Partial-Load faculty, we recommend that you avoid doing any work during any day when you are not under contract.
8. Download and use the “Bargaining for Better” Zoom background for all online meetings with college administrators and students.

Fleming Licensed Software

College management licences software from third parties to assist faculty in teaching their students. Some of the more familiar software packages faculty use are Microsoft’s Office 365 for Business, Desire2Learn’s Brightspace LMS, and Cisco’s WebEx Meetings. While these packages are ‘free’ for faculty to use, it is important to understand there are ‘strings attached’. When you log into any of these services from your office computer, laptop, tablet, or smartphone, you enter your Fleming email address and are taken to this screen:

After entering your Fleming College username and password, you are then logged into the third-party service. This means that Fleming’s IT department has access to any files and folders you use on these platforms. 

For example, a Fleming professor uploads several files to their Fleming OneDrive account and shares these files with their students. The professor believes that by password-protecting these files and sharing them directly with their students, only these students would have access to the files. However, since the professor uses their Fleming credentials to access Office 365, Fleming IT and by extension college management can also access any files in the professor’s OneDrive, WebEx Meetings, D2L/Brightspace accounts, etc.

What can Faculty Do?

If you are concerned about management having access to your files, you have several options. First, don’t continue using third-party software that requires you to log in with your Fleming username and password.

You might instead purchase an individual subscription to the same services, or explore some free alternatives. Instead of using the College Microsoft OneDrive account to share your files, you could set up a free Dropbox or Zoho Office account. The free accounts give you 2GB (Dropbox) or 5GB (Zoho) which is more than enough space for sharing course resources with students.

There are many benefits with using a non-Fleming cloud service. OneDrive for Business offers users the ability to send students an invitation to submit files to a protected folder. This feature can be used to have students submit an assignment directly to a specified folder on OneDrive, bypassing the D2L/Brightspace assignment dropbox. However, many of these useful features have been turned off by Fleming IT. However, Dropbox also offers ability to send students an invitation to submit files to a protected folder and can’t be turned off by Fleming IT or management. Files are date/time stamped and while students can submit their assignment to the folder, they can’t access any other students’ assignments.

D2L/Brightspace is the College’s preferred Learning Management System (LMS). Brightspace is a solid LMS, but Desire2Learn has partnered with third party software to add functionality to the platform through Brightspace Apps. The Brightspace AppFinder has many amazing tools that will improve functionality in your courses. However, in order for faculty to install these apps, faculty must first get approval from their Manager. Several chairs have turned down faculty requests for app integration in Brightspace.

Using a free open-source LMS will eliminate faculty’s reliance on management approval for turning on additional these additional features. The following article discusses 14 open-source learning management systems available as a free download: https://medevel.com/14-learning-management-systems-lms/

Work to Rule SWF Guide

The PDF below includes guidelines on work limits defined within your SWF and includes links to a video series on YouTube that describes in detail our SWFs and Article 11.