My role is to support and help realize that collective vision. However, ultimately, our faculty will decide what our general education program should be. Finally, the design is driven by a desire to help students experience a baccalaureate degree experience that helps them think critically and creatively, to solve problems and create opportunities, and to use this knowledge to advance a more inclusive vision of life, work, and service to their home, career, and community. It is grounded in a strong perspective that a comprehensive university can intentionally design a learning experience and leverage assessment findings to demonstrate the distinctiveness of their graduates to multiple constituents. It represents a personal design bias toward integrating a practical, applied liberal arts foundation across the broad spectrum of academic programs associated within a comprehensive university. Admittedly, it is a relatively strong statement of what our general education program could become. The Proposal presented is intended as a starting point – nothing more, nothing less. Therefore, embedded in the Assessment Plan Proposal, is a proposal to redesign the general education program. The construction of a programmatic assessment of general education was challenging given the lack of common intellectual experiences for our students. In effect, our general education program (like many others) is a menu of courses that students complete to check off a space on their “Bingo Sheet”. As I reviewed the various assessment reports for general education courses prepared over the last few years and examined how students matriculated through general education courses, it was clear that the 300 or so options for completing general education at IPFW provided little opportunity for faculty members to create a coherent curriculum or for students to experience a meaningful general education learning experience. The General Education Assessment Plan Proposal presented on Thursday, January 5th at the Transition Meeting was more than a simple assessment plan proposal. “What is difficult is getting a group of faculty from many different perspectives and prior institutional and educational experiences to work together to design or change a curriculum to be cogent, coherent, and meaningful to student.” (Ratcliff, J.L., 1996, p.6).
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