Saturday, March 24, 2007
March 9, 2007 Ad Hoc Committee Meeting
Present: Chris Cobb, Joe Incandela, Daniel Party, Charlie Peltier, Patti Sayre
Announcements:
- Joe reported on student work: students are currently developing a survey on Gen Ed (probably web-based) and have been advised to seek advice on how to set up a good survey from faculty in pschology and sociology, as well as the Institutional Researcher.
- Daniel reported on discussions he has had with some of the Women's Studies faculty: they are excited about having WOST more thoroughly integrated into Gen Ed, but staffing as it currently stands would make it impossible to have every student take WOST; a more likely scenario is that, if we are to require WOST, it would be a matter of selecting from a menu of courses, rather as WOST minors do now.
Next Steps:
- One issue is assessment: do we need, in proposing the models at this stage, to include something about how to assess their success should they be implemented? Or is that something for a later stage? Perhaps it is something to always be discussing among ourselves, but not cluttering the public presentation of the models with at this point.
- Another issue is advising: to what extent do we need to take into account how we would go about having this happen on the new plan? (e.g., on Model B, the required tandem would provide an automatic setting for first semester advising, but then what?)
- Another issue is resources: to what extent do we need to take into account staffing and other resources in designing models? Here a number of variables are relevant: the size of the entering classes, the average size of general ed courses (acknowledging some will be larger, and some smaller), the credit hours required to graduate, whether we are on 3-3 teaching loads, whether the standard course will be 3 or 4 hours, the extent to which we can double count courses to meet more than one requirement, how to fit 1-credit courses in, etc. Some resources that we might need to consult to collect data on these matters include the Registrar's Office and data (about course loads) from Faculty Affairs.
- THE MODEST PLAN TO MOVE FORWARD: The meeting ended with a general plan to have the originators of the models try to update each of the three remaining models by adding more details (in particular, adding on some sample schedules), but also building in whatever revisions seem good given feedback so far. Hopefully, by carrying on in this fashion, by the end of the semester our three models will converge to two, and we can have some sort of decision by the faculty at large about which two it will be.
# posted by Joe Incandela @ 4:52 AM 
Subscribe to Posts [Atom]