University at Buffalo (UB)
UB’s General Education program has not been revised for over 20 years. As periodic review and revision are essential to the long-term health of any academic enterprise, the Steering Committee believes it is time to reassert the value of General Education by updating its curriculum, re-imagining its structure, providing it with clear aims and objectives, and improving the quality of student learning.
In 2010, the General Education Task Force outlined some limitations of UB’s current General Education program when it wrote that, “the current program is too often perceived as a long laundry list of requirements that students want to ‘get through.’ By providing school specific exemptions from certain requirements [the program is] often perceived as unfair and incoherent. The existing program lacks a sense of ownership on the part of students and faculty alike; it’s not ours. Students, faculty and advisers ask, rightly so, for the overarching purpose and educational mission of our General Education program. They also ask why both are not being sufficiently explained to the university community and prospective students.” To indifference and want of purpose might also be added a lack of faculty oversight, the perception that General Education is a low institutional priority, and the absence of any clear learning outcomes or structure of authentic assessment.
Given that General Education constitutes approximately a third of the undergraduate credit hours required of UB students, it would be remiss to leave these issues unaddressed.
The current effort to revise General Education also partakes of a broader national movement embodied by initiatives such as the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) LEAP initiative (Liberal Education and America’s Promise). LEAP calls for a reinvigoration of General Education programs to better prepare students for the challenges of the twenty first century and the responsibilities of citizenship in a diverse, complex, and rapidly changing world.
Finally, UB deserves a world-class program of General Education. Nearly two thirds of the research-intensive institutions that constitute the American Association of Universities (of which UB is a member) have revised their General Education programs in part or in whole since 2009, and without action, we are in danger of falling behind.
In the face of student indifference towards the current program, we believe that by revising its structure and reinvigorating its provision, the university will be able to reconnect its students to the inherent value of the liberal arts and the essential skills and knowledge they contain. This means re-asserting what it means to be an educated citizen, and the ways in which excellent communication skills, quantitative and scientific literacy, an enlarged understanding of the world, and the ability to think critically and weave together discrete strands of experience will enable them to flourish both in university and beyond.
For faculty, the proposed General Education program provides an unprecedented opportunity to update their offerings and make their classes available to a broader undergraduate audience. In addition, the proposed integrative clusters provide an incentive to connect disciplinary material across the academic spectrum, and thus enable innovative collaborations between colleagues, departments and schools that will in turn enable students to see the benefit of study beyond narrowly-defined fields. Similarly, through components such as the First Year Seminar, faculty will be able to interact with students at a much earlier point in their academic career, and thus help to guide them in their choice of major. Research shows that undergraduate students are significantly more likely to major in a field when introduced to it by an engaged and inspiring faculty member.
As an institution, we believe that developing a rigorous, distinctive and intellectually exciting program of General Education will set UB apart from its peers, significantly raise our profile nationally and internationally, and aid in the recruitment of talented students.
The proposed program still requires students to study broadly across the liberal arts but with an added focus on integrative learning as foregrounded in the integrative cluster and integrative capstone concepts. In the absence of an overarching rationale or consistent faculty oversight, simple distribution – requiring students to pick courses from a set disciplinary list – is prone to becoming a ‘laundry list’ of options that students check off with little consideration for why they are being asked to study certain things or the connections between them.
For example, when the Steering Committee examined the type of courses most frequently used to fulfill the Arts, Languages, Natural Science, and Social Science requirements at UB, they found that each requirement was satisfied by a very small selection of courses, and without any overarching rationale beyond distribution itself. The Humanities requirement, meanwhile, was satisfied by successful completion of the Composition sequence ENG101 and ENG201.
This is not to question the inherent value of the courses themselves, but rather to draw attention to the fact that distribution alone is not sufficient to guarantee a coherent educational experience. When left unsupervised, distributive models may even atrophy into a routine series of offerings that do little to broaden student horizons or prompt meaningful reflection on their educational experience.
Integrative learning, by contrast, requires that students reflect upon the relationships between their classes, learning how to connect material across disciplinary boundaries and to grapple with the complementarities and tensions that exist between them. Integrative learning not only deepens the relationship to the material learned, it also helps to hone skills in critical thinking, ethical reasoning, inductive and deductive analysis, and the ability to associate data, information, and theories across classes. The process leads to a greater appreciation for difference and difficulty, and helps to instill the kind of intellectual flexibility that will prepare students for the complexity, diversity and change that is characteristic of the modern world.
Having said this, General Education classes will remain rooted in the disciplines. The work of integration will occur in addition to work within the disciplinary paradigms, not in the place of it.
No. This is a universal program with requirements that must be met by every undergraduate at UB with no exemptions or waivers. However, some requirements may be fulfilled in more than one way, and in the interest of timely completion of degree, some courses in the major may be counted towards General Education and vice versa, so long as the learning outcomes of General Education are demonstrably met.
Different students do have different needs, which can be met in the major, minors, membership of scholarly communities, participation in transcript notation programs, or any of the numerous experiential and co-curricular learning opportunities that the university provides.
General Education should represent the academic heart of the university and define the institution as a whole. Considerable benefits may be gained from a universal program. These include establishing a core set of academic values, building intellectual community through shared intellectual experiences, and providing a platform for students to collaborate on common topics across campuses and majors. Both ‘collaborative projects’ and ‘common intellectual experiences’ have been identified by the AAC&U as a ‘High Impact Educational Practices,’ that can result in improved student performance through increased academic engagement and higher rates of retention and success.
A universal program will also bring clarity of purpose to a program currently characterized by an unsystematic array of exemptions and waivers while enabling much needed faculty oversight of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. Finally, it will serve to inculcate some of the key traits of UB graduates as described in ‘Realizing UB2020’.
In shaping the proposal the Steering Committee has chosen to focus on the quality of the General Education students will receive over the quantity of credits they are required to take. In building a universal program, it has also been necessary to rationalize the number of required credits in order to make the program achievable by students in credit-intensive majors while still remaining substantive, challenging and enjoyable.
Having said this, however, the Steering Committee believes that a universal program will actually result in students taking more General Education overall. At present, the number of waivers and exemptions currently granted means that only 16% of undergraduates actually fulfill the full 48 credits with UB coursework.
The primary consideration of the Steering Committee has always been to build a program that will deliver an unsurpassed educational experience for UB undergraduates. However, in our efforts to rise to this challenge, it has also been necessary to consider a number of external factors that place certain parameters around our work.
First among these are the SUNY General Education Requirements (SUNY-GER) that must be completed by every student pursuing a baccalaureate degree at a SUNY institution (details of the SUNY-GER can be found in Appendix B of the ‘Progress Report’). Second is the role of external accreditation bodies such as the Middle States Commission on Higher Education and their ‘General Education Competencies and Standards of Excellence’ against which our program is assessed, as well as a number of degrees on campus whose programming is shaped in part by the requirements of accreditation agencies such as AACSB in the School of Management, ABET in the School of Engineering, and CEPH in the School of Public Health and Health Professions. Finally, the SUNY Seamless Transfer Initiative currently being developed for implementation across all 64 campuses within the SUNY system will require all undergraduate degrees to be capped at a total of 126 credits unless granted a special waiver. All these considerations provide context when attempting to devise a new General Education program.
No. Only those ladder faculty who elect to teach, or are assigned to do so by their department chair, will teach a First Year Seminar. The Steering Committee recommends that these decisions be made by schools and departments.
While we would like First Year Seminars to be taught by ladder faculty, we recognize that this is not always possible, and that UB has many gifted teachers who are not presently on the tenure track. In some circumstances, therefore, we would look to supplement ladder faculty with instructors with suitable experience and expertise.
No, but the First Year Seminar and UB101 will combine, integrating the content and learning outcomes of both. The Steering Committee and Student Affairs are currently collaborating on ways to bring these programs together.
Classroom space and facilities are an important consideration for delivery of any curriculum, and the Steering Committee has necessarily explored the realities of space limitations. The recommended section size for First Year Seminars, for example, is informed in part by the fact that UB has more centrally scheduled classrooms able to accommodate 20 students than it does classrooms that accommodate 25. Should the proposal move forward, the Office of the Registrar and Capital Planning Group would conduct a scheduling simulation that will allow us to understand potential space constraints and propose ways to alleviate them.
No. The library skills and information management content contained in the Library Skills Workbook will now be covered in the proposed Communicative Literacy sequence.
The reduction in natural science credits is part of the overall rationalization of the General Education program. Instead of simply counting the number of credit hours taken, however, we have looked to develop a science course that would be relevant and impactful for those students who most needed it.
Broadly speaking, 53% of UB undergraduates meet their current natural science requirement through the introductory classes in Chemistry, Biology and Physics that constitute foundational courses in their major. These students (generally found in STEM fields and the health sciences) will continue to fulfill the proposed Scientific Literacy and Inquiry requirement with these classes so long as they are able to demonstrate that the learning outcomes for Scientific Literacy and Inquiry have been met.
By contrast, we have found that the remaining 47% of students fulfill their natural science requirement with a rather narrow range of classes, the most popular being NTR 108: ‘Human Nutrition’ and NTR 109: ‘Nutrition in Practice’ along with its attendant lab. Indeed, 85.5% of students enrolled in NTR 108 and 109 take the class to fulfill this requirement.
While there is no question that these courses are excellent and that the study of nutrition is of immense value, it was the view of both the Steering Committee and the Scientific Literacy working group that the non-STEM/health majors would benefit more from a team-taught, multi-disciplinary course in the history, methods, paradigms and controversies of science than they would from the study of just one field. To this end, while the overall number of credits has been reduced, we believe that the proposed Scientific Literacy and Inquiry course has the potential to greatly expand the range of scientific knowledge and understanding of a significant portion of UB students. The proposed new course would also include a lab.
The integrative clusters will link courses thematically across disciplines. Within each theme, students will choose one class from each of three categories to create a cluster. Certain parameters will structure the clusters, not least the fact that courses within them must also serve to fulfill the requirements of the SUNY-GER not otherwise met in other areas of the proposed General Education program (an illustrative graphic is provided in Appendix E12 of the ‘Progress Report’). While freedom of choice will be somewhat impacted by this consideration, it will also ensure disciplinary variety. However, in order to get away from the list-checking aspects of the SUNY-GER, only the thematic, integrative nature of the clusters will be emphasized directly to the student.
In practical terms, we propose to develop an electronic interface that draws from the undergraduate catalog and enables students to build their clusters from a series of drop-down menus that change according to the choices made.
Yes. The integrative clusters represent an exciting opportunity to revivify the undergraduate curriculum in creative, collaborative and interdisciplinary ways. While courses within the current catalog can be offered within the cluster structure the Steering Committee hopes that faculty, departments and schools will see the advantages of developing and proposing new courses and clusters both within their own units, and in collaboration with colleagues across campus. Both the Office of Undergraduate Education and the proposed committee on integrative learning will provide support in the development of clusters.
No. Most of the General Education courses that are currently in the catalog would continue to count, although some courses would need to be revised to account for the new integrative theme structure and demonstrate some connection between the discrete subject matter and the broader thematic structure of which they formed a part. The work of making those connections, and the manner in which they will be made, will be up to instructors and students, and should seek to question and trouble categories of definition as well as simply reinforcing them.
More broadly, it is the Steering Committee’s hope that the proposal to revise General Education will prompt a general desire to revisit course offerings with a view to delivering a truly modern and distinctive undergraduate education at UB.
Ideally, yes. Once the integrative cluster concept is up and running and overseen by a faculty-led committee on integrative learning, we hope that motivated students will be able to identify a theme or course of study they wish to pursue and petition to have it count in fulfillment of their integrative cluster requirement. This will be true for both the Thematic Integrative cluster and the Global Integrative cluster.
The Steering Committee has given this serious consideration and reached the conclusion that within a universal program it is better to make language study an option for every student than it is to require it of only a few. At present, foreign languages are required of only 28% of students, with 19% completing the recommended two-course sequence. The vast majority of these students are within the College of Arts and Sciences. Students in the schools of Architecture, Engineering, Management, Nursing, Pharmacy, and Public Health and Health Professions, as well as a number of individual majors, are currently exempt from languages.
A commitment to global and diversity learning, however, is one of the central pillars of the proposed program, as foregrounded in the proposed Global Integrative cluster. 100% of undergraduates will be required to fulfill this component of the proposed program, irrespective of major, with the option to study languages being one of three ways of fulfilling this requirement along with a three-class cluster of global/diversity courses, or by studying abroad.
By making language study an option for all rather than a requirement for some, the Steering Committee hopes to promote intelligent student choice while ending the practice of exemption by program and similarly untethering language enrollments from the enrollments of a single school. We will also look to creative ways to incentivize the language track within the institution, by (for example) developing courses that complement the needs of students across a range of disciplines.
A present, courses in a foreign language are generally 5 credits each, with students commonly required to take a two-course sequence for the purposes of General Education. However, colleagues in the language departments have indicated an interest in developing 3 credit language classes and requiring students to take three. Hence 6-10 credits and ‘at least 9 credits of study in a single language.’
We greatly value the transformative benefits of study abroad, and believe that General Education is an important way to encourage more students to explore the world through the many travel opportunities the university provides. This includes the shorter study abroad programs that are particularly attractive to students conscious of time or resources.
As study abroad is a fully immersive experience with the educational potential to reach far beyond the credit hour, we believe that a direct international experience in combination with a campus-based course achieves the desired learning outcomes of the cluster. Furthermore, study abroad is often the springboard for additional study of the world, and may serve to introduce students to language study and participation in initiatives such as the Global Scholars Transcript Notation program.
This is a concern, and to that end, the university is committed to looking to grow the funding available for study abroad scholarships and increasing the number of affordable study abroad options available to UB students.
While the ‘Progress Report’ recommends retiring the UGC course prefix that is currently used by both World Civilizations and American Pluralism, it does not mean to imply that it wishes to see the end of this content as a part of UB’s General Education program. Rather, the Steering Committee recommends that the material covered by these courses be offered under the course prefixes of those departments that are best placed to offer it.
We have had vendor demonstrations from FolioTek, Livetext, Digication, and Blackboard/UBLearns. Of these, we have selected to use Digication to run an eportfolio pilot program in the fall semester of 2014. The pilot will use 20-30 sections of ENG101 and some classes within the Undergraduate Academies, reaching approximately 800 students.
Yes. Eportfolio accounts will be paid for by the university and will be available free of charge to students, faculty, staff, and alumni.
While we intend for every course within the proposed General Education program to utilize the eportfolio, the proposed Integrative Capstone – a 1 credit digital project that seeks to draw together all classes taken – will be overseen by TAs hired for the purpose. Technical support for the eportfolio platform will be provided by the Office of Educational Innovation and Assessment.
While there is no explicit provision for experiential learning in the proposed General Education program, colleagues in Academic Affairs, Student Affairs and the Faculty Senate continue to work on a definition and mode of delivery for experiential learning for campus-wide consideration at some future date. In the meantime, it is the hope of the Steering Committee that experiential learning opportunities will become a part of the proposed General Education program as faculty begin to think about creating new offerings in (for example) the First Year Seminar and Integrative Clusters.
Yes, and we encourage all innovative thinking as it relates to course delivery, regardless of modality.
Yes, although the extent and scope of our present practice will be subject to review.
Yes. Appendix F of the ‘Progress Report’ shows how the proposed program maps onto the SUNY-GER.
While appearing counter-intuitive, the aim of the sample programs in Appendix D is merely to show how the proposed program might fit around a selection of pre-existing majors. It was not the intention of the Steering Committee to show how certain majors might be re-arranged or re-configured to accommodate the proposed program as only departments can make those determinations. The Office of Undergraduate Education, however, hopes to partner in conversations about how to best sequence the program in all majors, and has already had productive preliminary conversations with the schools of Engineering, Management and Pharmacy.
The earliest that the proposed General Education program might be implemented would be fall 2016, subject to the approval of the Faculty Senate. All incoming freshmen from that date would be subject to the new requirements. Students who entered UB prior to fall 2016 and maintained continuous enrollment will be subject to the same General Education program required at the time of their first enrollment. Sections of classes in the former program would continue to be offered until such time as they might be appropriately phased out.
Transfer students entering UB at any time after the adoption of the proposed program would be subject to the new requirements. Transfer coursework that articulates to UB courses would be applied to any of these new requirements.
UB will continue its long history of articulating equivalent coursework to ensure transfer students receive full credit for their prior coursework. GETA (General Education Transcript Addendum) transcripts for students transferring from SUNY institutions will be applied to any courses that meet the SUNY-GER.
General Education will be administered by the Office of Undergraduate Education under the Dean of Undergraduate Education in collaboration with a faculty-appointed oversight committee and sub-committees such as a committee on integrative learning and a UB writing council. In collaboration with the new Office of Educational Innovation and Assessment, Undergraduate Education will be responsible for devising a program of authentic assessment and subjecting the program to a regular cycle of review and revision.
Should the proposal be adopted, Undergraduate Education would partner with the advising community to make sure the new program was fully understood and communicated to students.
As clarity of purpose is one of the principles that helped to shape the proposed program, we will look to develop a simple, elucidatory narrative for General Education that can be easily shared by students, faculty and staff alike. As with the current program, students would be able to track their own progress via HUB and the Academic Advising Report (AAR).
Undergraduate and graduate student representatives sat on the 2009 General Education Task Force, and were consulted in two forums as part of the 2013-14 General Education effort. In addition, 1173 undergraduates responded to a survey of their opinions on General Education in the spring semester 2014. Moving forward, the Student Association has agreed to partner with the Dean of Undergraduate Education with a view to soliciting feedback on the proposal in the fall of 2014.
Hopefully not. The Steering Committee (while not trying especially hard) has failed to come up with a better name, but has expressed a keen interest in giving the program a distinctive and engaging moniker. We have considered running a competition among the students, as with the naming of HUB.
While the ‘Progress Report’ represents the summed efforts of more than 100 faculty, staff and students who have been thinking, debating and researching General Education since 2009, it should be considered a point of departure rather than the port of arrival. It is our hope that the report will serve to facilitate informed discussion around the issues it contains, with that discussion ultimately leading to a campus-wide consensus around the future of General Education at UB.
To this end, the Steering Committee invites feedback of the proposal online at www.buffalo.edu/gened and in person. Two public forums to debate the proposal have been organized as follows:
These sessions will be video recorded and made available online for those unable to attend.
In addition, we hope that schools, departments and units will choose to discuss the plan at their regular meetings. Members of the Steering Committee are happy to attend meetings and answer questions as required.
Following this period of consultation, the Steering Committee intends to aggregate and digest feedback before determining next steps. These steps will vary depending on the feedback received, but will certainly contain provision for reflection and revision as well as time for further discussion before delivering a final recommendation for the full consideration of the Faculty Senate.