January 27, 2012
| Members Present | Ex-Officio Present | Guests Present |
| Jonathan Allison | Bill Rayens | Chris Thuringer |
| Ruth Beattie | Mike Shanks | |
| Heather Bush | Debra Sharp | |
| Derek Lane | ||
| Juliana McDonald | ||
| Ben Withers |
- The minutes for December 2nd were approved
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Kathy Crouch had a time conflict and could not come to discuss the new document handling system. Drs. Withers and Rayens related what they knew about it based on previous sessions conducted by Kathy Crouch.
3. Rayens welcomed Dr. Juliana McDonald as the new Area Expert in Global Dynamics; Rayens went on to discuss the status of member recruitment for three open slots (U.S., Social Science, and C&C I)
4. GRN 25 was pulled from the consent agenda for discussion. At issue were the learning outcomes on the syllabus, which were judged as largely not measurable. The Committee passed the course anyway with a directive to Rayens to inform the faculty member who submitted the course that making these outcomes measurable would be a distinct improvement and might save delays further along in the review process.
A related discussion ensued concerning the recent decision by Undergraduate Council that the curriculum flow should not be thwarted because of syllabus issues beyond what is explicitly required by a Senate or University regulation. The Committee felt it was important to remind the Senate Council that it would be preferable to surface this larger question campus-wide and have the debate openly, with the hope that there could be an agreed upon set of requirements that might go beyond those few that have been codified. Dr. Lane volunteered to take the lead on constructing a draft of a statement from IGEOC that would then be shared with the Senate Council and Dr. Mike Mullen, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education.
5. ANT 330 (U.S.) and GEO 109 (Arts and Creativity) passed through on the consent agenda.
6. The Committee received an update on rubrics being developed in the four Inquiry areas, as well as in Statistical Inferential Reasoning. Dr. Royster was absent so no update was received concerning Quantitative Foundations. Dr. Rayens mentioned that Dr. Jane Jensen, formally the Social Sciences Area Expert, had agreed to finish the task of facilitating the development of the Inquiry in the Social
Sciences Rubric. It was generally agreed that all the rubrics would be completed by the end of February 2012.
7. Area Experts discussed courses they have out for review or need to get out for review. Rayens advised the Area Experts to simply sit on the HON courses they received last December, since the last IGEOC heard, better constructed generic syllabi were in the offing. The Committee expressed some caution that it might indeed be impossible to construct a generic syllabus for an entire Area in the Core.
The Committee asked Rayens to make sure Dr. Mullen had informed the Honors Director and the submitting faculty that the review process was on hold. Mr. Thuringer agreed to bring that message to Dr. Mullen.
8. Mr. Thuringer talked for while about revisions he is facilitating for the UK Core website, as well as revisions to the MyUK course listings that will soon allow students to list and search only UK Core classes in a particular Area.
