terrapinsanity.com

We’re much entertained this morning by a nice little report in the Diamondback on where we are with the new General Education requirements. (See General Ed curriculum moves forward) It begins…

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.

Sounds grand! Of course … nobody yet knows what a lot of the new requirements will be since we have not yet figured them out. It was only a week ago that some of those responsible for papering over the gaping holes in Farvardin’s Folly held a working lunch to talk about what the upper level ‘scholarship in practice’ component might be, for example, and memos are just going out to faculty inviting discussion of same.

So to translate the DB article: “We decided on an advertising program and are excited to print up new color glossies, and we’re sure we will have some of that academical content figured out by the time y’all would ever get here.” Sure gives you a sense of confidence that we are serious about scholarship, huh?

President Loh’s comments in the same DB article were the most refreshing we have seen on the new Gen Ed program, however:

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.”

Many people observed right from its start that the revised Gen Ed model was high in cost, disruptive to many other campus business processes and all for little measurable scholastic gain. In classic College Park fashion, those who voiced questions were pummeled by the Main Admin knee breakers who quickly assured everyone that this Admissions Undergraduate Studies initiative would simply look fabulous. Nice to see a frank acknowledgement that maybe there are some cost issues after all.

What are some of the unreal aspects? They’ve been written of in the past (here and elsewhere) and will be demonstrated graphically stating with the next freshman class, but greatest among them is the I-series. Each I-series course is almost inextricably bound to a professor who crafted it. We have yet to see the first example of such a course (of the handful on which I-series was patterned) carry over into a successful offering by any other faculty member, and indeed the calls for courses make clear that Main Admin anticipates huge turnover. What this churn means is that:

• Students can’t make four-year plans since nobody knows for sure what I-series courses can run even a semester in advance in some cases, much less a couple years. Courses dependent upon specific faculty members become dependent upon that professor’s professional schedule.
• Most students who find they’ve done poorly in a class likely won’t get an opportunity for re-take to repair the GPA. So much for freshman forgiveness. Big advising issues down the line.
• Department chairs who once had a stable target for fulfilling their Gen Ed tithe now have a moving target. When doing enrollment management they once knew which courses met core and could anticipate how many seats they would need to cover, and when making decisions about, say, sabbaticals or hiring, they only needed to think in terms of aggregate teaching capacity. Did they have enough to cover their teaching obligations? Now chairs will be further constrained as they either need to keep faculty tethered to the I-series courses they created (which will chaff in departments where teaching ‘service’ courses is not rewarded in promotion decisions) or hand an I-series course – which by definition lacks enduring content and is heavy on a prof’s ‘unique flair’ – to someone else, wishing them luck. And we know that an outline with attached powerpoint slides simply are not an adequate carrier of the essence of a course even in ordinary classes – this simply won’t work where the essence of the course is based on a specific professor. Students will be the big losers here. At least the instructor will still get a pay check.

The list goes on but the definitive reason we know the new Gen Ed is broken is also contained in the DB article: “…some faculty members are still in the process of being trained to teach the new courses.” Wow. And we thought faculty were the ones in the drivers seat for their classes.