Minutes of the General Education Committee
for April 9, 2008

The General Education Committee met on Wednesday, April 9, 2008; attending were Bob Canary, Erika Behling, Don Cress, James Robinson, Frances Kavenik, Lori Allen, Theresa Castor, Suresh Chalasani, Ed Wallen, and substituting for Camilla Simon, David Wilson.

The minutes from March 24 were accepted.

The Director gave us a budget update, indicating that there were funds to support the numerous initiatives we wish to undertake (see below), especially over this coming summer. We expressed our gratitude.

She first asked for volunteers for the "Academic Overview and Advising"
portion of summer orientation for new students, which we indicated we wished the general education program to have some part of. There are 9 sessions scheduled, from April through August, each has about 100 new students attending. One can commit to do only the academic overview (she showed us the powerpoint version Gary Wood had produced last year) or that and the general advising (uncommitted students) in the afternoon as well.

Lori also pointed out that our website presence is woefully out of date, not having been refreshed since Susan Haller left. Jim offered to work with Lori and perhaps a librarian (Vanaja? Erika?) to bring it up to date.

The other volunteer opportunity has to do with the upgrading of our (very
outdated) TIS/transfer credit system being undertaken by the registrar's office. Don pointed out that the state of Illinois already has a website that evaluates courses for transferability within the state systems (public and private), and that we could feed off that information.
Illinois is by far the state from which we receive the most transfer students. Suresh, Don, and Frances agreed to work on this during the summer.

We looked again at the CLEP/College Board descriptions for the three distribution areas: Natural Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Arts and Humanities, which appear in the March minutes. The discussion centered on the usefulness of these descriptions, beyond enabling the categorization of courses, and ran aground on the issue of how these define a body of knowledge. No conclusion seemed to be reached.

We discussed Suresh's very well contrived Plan and Procedures for general education assessment (see forwarded email), and made a few changes--mainly a longer timeline (3 years instead of 2). We also asked for volunteers to be liaisons to departments and programs:

Theresa: COMM, HUMA, ETHN
Ed: BIOS, GS
Lori: CHEM, GEOS, PSYC, SOCA
Frances: ENGL, WOMS, HPEA
Don: MATH, PHYSICS, PHIL
Suresh: BUS, FIN, CS

Clearly, this does not cover all departments and programs, so we need more volunteers.

We looked at the Northern Illinois version of reauthorization of general education courses (see forwarded email), and decided it was too long, but that the last page (page 8) had some promise. Bob pointed out that Bill Blanchard should have most, if not all, of this information, and that it would be a kindness to department chairs and program directors for us to fill out the "cover sheet" in advance of our meeting with them, then have the chair confirm the information.

Looking at the overall assessment plan, we established that Literacy continues to develop and be applied in a variety of situations and courses, and will probably receive OPID funding again next year. We looked at the summary of Critical Thinking prepared by Ev's subcommittee last year, and found it still too cumbersome to be a meta-rubric. The meta-rubric prepared by Sue Norton and Suresh was a good start, but needs work--Theresa offered to work with Suresh on a next draft.

Given the rather poor showing of Teamwork as a goal and our continuing discomfort with Personal Responsibility, we may need to rethink that category, and/or our requirement that each general education course should have an objective from one of the three major categories.

We need to look for a director for next year. Lori has done an excellent job but wants to pass the torch to the next director as soon as possible.
Please think about possible candidates.

We decided we needed one more meeting: Wednesday, April 30, from 2-4 p.m.
in CART 233. (Apologies to those of you for whom this time is not
working.)

--FMK