Undergraduate Studies Committee
Tuesday, November 12, 2019
12:45 p.m. WH 117
Meeting Minutes
Attending Voting Members: F. Weening (AMAT), K. Spink (BIOL), E. Corradi (CAEE), R. Guan (CHEM), C. Hood (CS), E. Oruklu (ECE), E. Hazard (HUM), C. Wark (MMAE), D. Gidalevitz (PHYS), M. Gray for C. Adams (ROTC), R. Trygstad (SAT), S. Blanchard (SGA), J. Twombly (SSB), P. Ireland (SSCI)
Also attending: J. Gorzkowski (UGAA), J. Mohammadi (Graduate College), N. Novak (GL), G. Smith (UGAA), C. Torres (CoA), C. Emmons (Assessment), S. Glover (Registrar), Brad Katz (Digital Learning), Matt Bauer (Humanities), Chris Himes (Lewis College), Brent Stephens (CAEE)
Departments with absent voting members: ARCH, BME, CHBE, PSYC
Documents for this meeting are available at: http://www5.iit.edu/~ugsc/documents/2019-2020
Meeting chaired by Greg Pulliam
Minutes recorded by Fred Weening
Quorum declared at: 12:47 pm
Adjourn at: 1:34 pm
1. Approval of the minutes for October 22, 2019.
The approval of the minutes passed unanimously.
Old Business
2. Core curriculum assessment plan. (Pulliam, Emmons)
G. Pulliam summarizd the Core Curriculum Assessment Plan (see UGSC website for the document) that he and C. Emmons have proposed.
◦ Each semester, beginning in Spring 2020, one of the four Core Curriculum goals will be assessed on a rotating basis.
◦ A three-person committee (with membership criteria spelled out in the proposal) will assess how well the goals are being met. This committee membership will change each semester as different goals are being assessed.
◦ A sample of up to 3 courses (with a total of at least 40 students) will be selected from the curriculum map (also available on UGSC website) to be assessed.
◦ Asssessment will be made using a predetermined rubric, and blackboard will be used to coordinate the assessment and store the student-created artifacts.
It is expected that this plan will be modified over the next few semesters as we learn more about what works and what doesn't through implementation. Members of the UGSC should take the current plan back to their departments for feedback. The proposed plan will be voted on in the next UGSC meeting.
New Business
3. New 10-day, 3-hour-credit courses offered by LCHS and Humanities (Himes and Bauer).
C. Himes indicated that there has been a desire from various parts of the university to offer a few courses in the time between the end of the Fall semester and the beginning of the Spring semester. This year two such courses,
· PHIL 380 (Judgement and Decision Making)
· COM 421 (Technical Communication)
are being offered. Each course will be offered in an on-line only format. The classes will require students to work on-line at least 4.5 hours each day for 10 consecutive days (including weekends). In future years it is hoped that an official “winter term” can be created, but this year the PHIL 380 course is officially in the Fall 2019 semester and the COM 421 course is in the Spring 2020 semester.
Discussion and questions followed including:
· Might it be better to offer each as 20-day courses?
· These courses were selected because they are frequently taught, and so a comparison of the outcomes of this format to the normal format should be possible.
· Students shouldn't need to get overload approval since these courses are not meeting at the same time as regular classes. For this year students will need to contact the registrar if they get an overload restriction.
· Students should be required to get advisor approval since these are on-line courses. M. Bauer, chair of Humanities, indicated that students enrolling in PHIL 380 were not required to get advisor approval as per University policy, but that students enrolling in COM 421 did have to get this approval.
· Such offerings can be an alternative to a summer course for students needing to catch-up in their program of study.
· Only IIT students can register for these courses.
· Concern was expressed over the Philosophy course satisfying C designation for the core curriculum in this format.
4. CAE 470 as I-course: retroactive application? (Corradi)
B. Stephens, Chair of the CAEE department, indicated that the course CAE 470 (Construction Methods and Cost Estimating) has received approval to be an I-course in Spring 2020. Upon learning this, many student in this semester's class asked if the I-course status could be extended to this semester as well.
Discussion followed with the recommendation that I-pro subcommittee would need to be contacted by the CAEE department and they would need to make a recommendation to the UFC.
5. Information item: Accelerated Master's Program (Pulliam).
J. Mohammadi, Dean of the Graduate College, discussed the Accelerated Graduate Master's Program (AMP) Guidelines document (available on the UGSC website).
A short discussion followed. J. Mohammadi indicated that any further comments regarding the document can be sent directly to him.
6. Discussion: Should UGSC address the Category 2 (Teaching) Faculty retention and promotion issue ? (Pulliam)
G. Pulliam indicated that at the recent all faculty meeting there was a failed motion to change the criteria/assessment bodies for retention and promotion of Category 2 faculty. There will be a new effort to propose such changes and he asked whether the UGSC committee wants to get involved in any way.
A discussion followed in which it was noted that the original proposal came from a committee which did not have any Category 2 faculty membership. There was general consensus that Category 2 faculty should be included on a committee which will determine how they will be evaluated for retention and promotion. R. Trygstad volunteered to draft a statement to this effect for consideration by the next meeting of the UGSC.
Other Business
K. Spink indicated that her department has a major who has a scheduling conflict with a required Chemistry course and a required PT course. She asked whether there were any plans to offer PT early in the morning, ending prior to 8:30am, as has been done in previous years.