October 22, 2010

Information Items

1.  Meeting with the Deans:

Rayens and Greissman updated the Committee on the brief meeting that Drs. Ray and Mullen had with the Deans, concerning Gen Ed assessment.

2.  Meeting with Computer Science:

Rayens reported on his meeting with Computer Science to discuss their transition to the new Gen Ed program.  Rayens reported it was an upbeat meeting with evidence of many proactive ideas coming from CS.

3.  Update on vetting progress

•   Rayens reported that Dr. Grabau (Area Expert for Global Dynamics) reported having difficulties getting referees. Dr. Yanarella offered to give some suggestions on how to increase that pool.

•   Dr. Withers suggested that in future we should use Deans to identify these individuals who would comprise the referee pools.

•   Dr. Withers also suggested looking to recruit referees from those people who received money to develop the initial Gen Ed courses.

4.  Assessment vision (draft) from Dr. Connie Ray

•   Rayens read parts of this vision to the group, and the full statement was available with the agenda.

•   Assessment office, Leah Simpson, reported that in the first round the AAC&U rubrics would be used. GEOC and a committee by Associate Provost Heidi Anderson would then be charged with suggesting how these rubrics might be improved.

•   Dr. Mountford cautioned that the AAC&U rubrics were devised for generic student learning outcomes across the nation, and they may not measure some of the innovations in our Gen Ed Program. For example, the Gen Ed Student Learning Outcome 2 (SL2) requires instruction in visual communication, but the AAC&U rubrics most applicable to SL2 donot measure student achievement in this area.  Dr. Mountford offered the opinion that organic assessments are much preferred.

•   Ms. Simpson pointed out that one of the benefits of the national rubric is that one can do comparison across many universities.

•   General consensus that given the necessity of having assessment data for SACS, we should use the AAC&U rubric to get some data for SACS.

•   Committee wanted to record a strong statement, however, that GEOC intends the AAC&U rubrics to be used only temporarily; if faculty in particular areas want to revise these to better fit Gen Ed at U.K. they should be encouraged to do so.

•   Suggestion to have GEOC look at taking on this task. This suggestion was followed with recognition of how overworked the Committee already is, which led to a serious suggestion that perhaps GEOC should be funded.

•   Request by Committee to look at the AAC&U (Value) Rubrics. Mr. Greissman agreed to provide those.

•   Suggestion to invite Dr. Anderson right away to visit and tell us more about the plans she has for the work of her new committee.

Consent Agenda

ENR 201, ENG 230, ENG 234, and HIS 208 were on the consent agenda:

•   EGR 201 was removed because of questions about sustainability, questions raised by Area Experts who act formally as a subcommittee of Undergraduate Council

•   ENG 230 and ENG 234 were removed pending clarification of language regarded “themed” courses.

•   HIS 208 was left on the agenda and was therefore passed by GEOC and sent on to Undergraduate Council.

Discussion Items

1.  AP courses

•   Significant discussion ensued about how to handle AP credit for incoming freshman. This is a critical item that has to be handled soon, but it did not find convergence in this meeting.

•   The current discussion seemed to offer informal support to the idea of having each department that is logically associated with each AP area, look at the AP exams in the context of the Gen Ed vetting process and ask if passing that AP exam should count for Gen Ed credit.

•   It was acknowledged that this might lead to more detailed advice such as “a 3 would be premajor credit, a 4 or 5 would be ….”