General Education

Resources

Final General Education Plan, with included approved rubrics and tagging criteria appendices (Oct. 2009)

Faculty Guide to General Education A five page summary of the plan specifically for faculty.

Faculty Quick Guide to General Education A one page overview of how to submit courses for general education tags.

Course Tag Submission Form A template for faculty who submit a course for inclusion in the general education program.

Extradisciplinary Course Tag Submission Form A template for faculty who will be teaching an extradisciplinary seminar section in the general education program.

Committee

The University General Education Committee was established in 2009-10. Current membership includes:

Dr. Chris North, College of Arts & Sciences
Dr. Lisa Robeson, College of Arts & Sciences
Dr. Robert Waters, College of Arts & Sciences
Dr. Terry Maris, College of Business Administration
Dr. Ken Reid, College of Engineering
Dr.Karen Kier, College of Pharmacy
Dr. Juliet Hurtig, Academic Affairs
Ms. Cara Schroeder, Student Senate representative

The committee is currently investigating student portfolio software that will store the electronic artifacts created by tagged general education courses. It is hoped that this software will also assist the university in closing the assessment loop by collecting rubric scores. If you have experience or recommendations for products, please let someone on the committee know.

Tag Requests

The committee is also ready to accept submissions for general education tags. An online form has been created to assist faculty with this process. The University General Education committee does not approve a course; that is done within the context of the faculty member's college. This form is used only to seek approval for general education tags for a specific course.

Before completing the form, it is best if faculty review the criteria for tagging, found in Appendix B in the Final General Education Plan. The form requires some basic course information (title, credits, etc.), the identification of which learning outcomes the course will address and in what manner, and then the identification of the artifacts supporting the outcomes. Finally, faculty are asked to state which rows of the rubrics will be applied to the artifact. Please see Appendix A in the Final General Education Plan for the rubrics.

Faculty can use the online form in two ways. The first would be to sit down and enter all of the information in one setting and then click on the button "Produce MS Word File". The other would be to use the form to get all the applicable check marks and drop down selections completed and put as much info as possible in the paragraph text boxes. Then click on the button "Produce MS Word File". In either case, the faculty member will have a local copy of this form to edit and finalize. Once you have finished this task, please submit the form via email as an attachment to Julie Hurtig, j-hurtig@onu.edu

The committee will meet as needed throughout the remainder of this school year to approve tags as courses are created. If the committee has questions regarding a submission, we will contact the faculty member to gather more information. Please contact Julie Hurtig or another member of the committee with any questions or concerns.

Requests to add a tag to a course, or to change an existing tag or artifact on an approved course, must be received by the General Education committee within the first two weeks of the term prior to the course being offered. Similarly, requests to remove a tag from a course must be received by the General Education committee within the first two weeks of the term prior to the course being offered.

Extradisciplinary Course Tag Requests

The Fall 2012-13 course offerings will include extradisciplinary seminars for the students who entered ONU as freshman in Fall 2011. The theme for these seminars in 2012-13 and 2013-14 will be globalization, and the seminars will be 3 credits each with a course enrollment maximum of 18 students. The basic guidelines for an extradisciplinary seminar are summarized in the attached file.

Each extradisciplinary seminar course will have two artifacts and two tags. One tag must be critical and creative thinking. The General Education Committee has decided that in order to ensure some consistency across the extra-disciplinary seminar experience, critical and creative thinking will be demonstrated by way of a substantive paper that asks students to generate new information or solve a problem. This paper needs to have at least one major revision to aid in the practices of effective writing. In the description of the artifact below, please indicate the content of the paper you will ask students to write. The faculty member is free to choose the other tag and its artifact.

If you are interested in teaching an extradisciplinary seminar, please coordinate with your department chair and/or dean's office to place your seminar on the course offerings list for Fall 2012. and/or Spring 2013. The course will be called EXDS 2001 with each section having its own title. (Similar to TREX 1001 if you have seen its listings.) We will need approximately 20 sections in 2012-13 to teach half of these students as sophomores, with the other half taking the course in 2013-14 as juniors. In 2013-14, this requirement will double to almost 40 sections to handle two cohorts.

An online form for tagging an extradisciplinary course has been created. This form is blue in background color, but otherwise works very similar to the standard gen ed tagging form. You can submit your form via email to Julie Hurtig, j-hurtig@onu.edu If you have any questions, please contact a member of the gen ed committee or Julie Hurtig.