General Education Committee (GEC)/First Year of Studies (FYS)

Joint meeting minutes: 10.23.07

Item One: GEC will be receiving a request from the Economics Dept. requesting Gen Ed status for a Personal Finance course.

Item Two: Faculty Assembly. GEC needs to begin the process of requesting official status as a committee of the Faculty Assembly. We can use the Center For Teaching Excellence as a model for our proposal. EPC is also a model. John M. will draft our request.

Item Three: Pilot exploratory FYS LCs. 3 themes have been proposed, one will be selected at the next meeting. Discussion:

These are “Super-Learning Communities” oriented around a common theme.

How they will be clustered is to be decided. What courses are included? IL, NSS, either English 101 or a Communications Gen Ed class, and one other course.

How are they to be evaluated: this needs to be figured out.

There will need to be faculty training.

Can we remove one of the “skills” courses and replace it with an outcome within another course? No, this creates too much resistance, and isn’t necessary. We’re trying to work toward having all students complete these basic courses in their first year. English and Comm. prof.s are already over-burdened. Yes, we cannot now require these courses of all FY students.

Item Four: Proposal for a First Year of Study (FYS)

What are the learning outcomes? How will they be measured? Will we stifle our LCs by imposing this new model? Is it really just a kind of LC structure?

The FYS committee should disband and turn over these questions to the GEC. How will co-curricular aspects be represented in the GEC? We have precedent for having staff on faculty committees.

We have not yet clarified the function and reporting line of the GEC. This needs to be done. The GEC needs to be a standing committee of elected members to oversee the Gen Ed curriculum because this is over 50% of our educational experience.

Learning Outcomes for FYS: to provide a common experience for all 1^st year students; to ratchet up our academic quality and to improve retention; to improve student ability to make connections across disciplines. Should outcomes be determined by the courses being taught?

What particular shortcomings are being addressed by this FYS? How will the FYS address these shortcomings?

Shortcomings: lack of coordination between all the good things people are doing; retention is good, but can always be better; our own studies show that we are merely average in comparison with peer institutions: we can do better.

The governance issue for the GEC needs to be addressed first.

Should these pilot programs be overseen by the FYS or GEC?

Resolved: the pilot programs will have a liaison with GEC so that they can be monitored. FYS will meet to draft a summary of its minutes so that the GEC will be able to trace the development of the proposal. It will then disband.