General Ed curriculum moves forward

With 10,000 freshly printed copies of an entirely new recruiting brochure and a redesigned website launching next week, university officials are several steps closer to phasing the current CORE curriculum into the newly revamped General Education program.

Since the University Senate voted to approve the implementation of a new General Education program in February, a general education committee and numerous faculty members across the campus have been working to prepare a more innovative curriculum for next year's freshmen. And although officials had to delay the program's transition by a year because many professors felt rushed creating new curricula, Undergraduate Studies Dean Donna Hamilton told senators at yesterday's meeting implementation hasn't faced any new roadblocks.

The new curriculum requires students to complete a more diverse set of classes, including oral communication and analytical reasoning, as well as two "I"-series courses, which are innovative courses that emphasize blended learning techniques. Students under this program will have more options in fulfilling their distributive studies requirements and have to complete fewer general education credits to graduate.

Since February, officials have approved all the new courses for more than 200 programs. Hamilton previously speculated it would take Office of Information Technology officials more than 5,300 labor hours to transition the new courses online; the bulk of that work is now complete, she said yesterday.

Additionally, Hamilton said her department created new recruiting brochures that boast the new general education to prospective students. Officials will also be launching a new website next week that breaks down course requirements under the new plan for students.

Although some faculty members are still in the process of being trained to teach the new courses, Hamilton said the biggest task this fall will be ensuring all programs craft new, four-year plans by the end of the semester.

Despite the work ahead, Hamilton said officials are confident the program will be implemented as seamlessly as possible by next fall. While officials have been working with community colleges to ensure a clear transfer credit policy is crafted before implementation is complete, Hamilton said faculty members have been preparing their departments for the overhaul.

"The majority of faculty agreed to come back to work [on the program], and I thought that was absolutely phenomenal that the faculty came right back," she said at the meeting. "We met with each of the colleges individually [in August] and showed them the methodology we had used … so they could calculate how much work we needed done and where."

University President Wallace Loh said the biggest challenge in implementing the new program lays in funding new courses and recruiting faculty members to teach them.

"The major issue is not the quality of the proposal — it's implementation. Implementation means, among other things, money," Loh said in an interview. "I'm certainly very supportive not only of the general education program, but also of its implementation, so it's not just on paper and we bring it into an operational reality."

Some student senators said future students under the program will receive a more diverse education, which will prepare them better for the job market.

"They've taken our already good general education program and made it more expansive and require you to have more diversity as a student, which I always think is a good thing," undergraduate student senator Alex Miletich said. "It's requiring students to hone in on more humanities classes, which is good, and just overall, I like how they've expanded what [they] need to take."

abutaleb@umdbk.com