Q: Why are faculty being asked to provide copies of their Gen Ed syllabi each semester?
Short answer: HLC obligations. We need to be able to provide documentation, including syllabi, for our Gen Ed curriculum, potentially on short notice. This collection also allows the Director of General Education to ensure a minimum of consistency in terms of each course using the SLOs that we, as faculty, adopted for each component of the Gen Ed curriculum.
- Important to remember: Gen Ed courses serve not just the needs of the department or unit, but they meet campus-wide curriculum goals and requirements as well.
Q: Before I submit it, do I need to set up my syllabus in any particular way?
Faculty should (of course) format their syllabi as they see fit, but please include the Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs) that are specific to each component within the Gen Ed curriculum.
- For instance, SLOs for classes meeting the Critical Thinking requirement look very different than, say, the SLOs for classes meeting Health & Wellness.
- SLOs for each component of General Education (such as Critical Thinking, Quantitative Reasoning, Health & Wellness, etc.) can be found here. These are the SLOs that are assessed for the general-education program; please include them clearly on your syllabus.
Q: What do I do if I use Canvas to share what would go on a syllabus and I don’t have one discrete syllabus document?
While Canvas is central to how many people set up their courses, it’s still essential that we collect actual syllabus documents. A few reasons for this:
- Discrete syllabus documents are needed for assurance reporting to HLC;
- Students transferring from our campus often need a syllabus document so that their new institution can appropriately identify and recognize courses meeting their requirements;
- A syllabus is required as part of the approval process for new courses in the general-education curriculum; and
- Course-change requests in the CARMIn system require the submission of a syllabus document.
Once you have all of the syllabus components and information available in Canvas, hopefully it’s a relatively simple matter to compile them into one document.