 Welcome everyone. We're glad that we have several people joining us today for this discussion about the recertification process of genetic courses. The way we're going to structure it today is we're going to start with a panel presentation just to give a general overview of the process and the expectations, but we would like to devote a lot of time to your questions. So we have posted a message in chat. Please feel free to type any questions that you have as they come up during the presentation or we're a small group so also if you're more comfortable unmuting your microphone just asking questions that's fine as well if you would prefer to do that. So we are joined today by Maggie Slattery and Jodi Bender with that Richardson and with the Spankler. So these four people will be our panel who will be answering your questions and talk with people full process. I think Maggie is going to start us off with a slide presentation that gives a general overview. Thank you very much. I apologize for my voice. This is remarkably good for where I was at yesterday. So I'm using some slides that were provided for the Shire conference by Michelle Duffy, who's the chair of curricular affairs. And so we'll go through them, many of them rather quickly because I'll provide them to you. You can use them as a resource after the fact. I do love, you know, questions are probably much more useful than any of these slides. So we'll leave a lot of time for that. There is a video of this presentation from the Shire conference on the Shire Institutes website. If you ever feel like for another hour and lots of questions, there's lots of Q&A there. And while I'm not currently in chair of curricular affairs and I'm not a voice of curricular affairs, I had, I previously spent two years serving as chair of curricular affairs. I have a sense of what typically happens at curricular affairs. That hasn't changed too much since I was chair, but you know, there is a little bit of nuance depending on who the chair is. So I'm not speaking on her behalf today. Okay. So we're going to talk about just a little bit of information about what the process is like because many people don't know the process or don't use the process frequently. So just a refresher there, some tips on preparing the proposal and preparing responses to the general education costs. So we're primarily talking about recertifying general education courses. Earlier, while we were getting ready for this meeting, I found that there are 64 EMS courses that need, that were on the books prior to the beginning of recertification. So that's not an insignificant number. And I think that's why we've been asked to have this session today. So you can go ahead and slide. There are a fair number of resources on the Gen Ed website. It was the under faculty and staff. There's a job aid, which is a word doc of all the possible prompts on a curricular proposal. There's a sample integrative studies proposal. There's a sample syllabus that the curricular fairs is looking for. So curricular fairs is not looking for a syllabi that detail every graded assignment and attendance point in a course. They're looking for the durable content that makes up a course. So there's many, many sections that you would include on a good regular syllabus. You do not need to include on this, don't need the disability statement, don't need all of that. So there's a sample syllabus template of key sections that we're looking for, or what they're looking for. So they're really looking for what makes this course distinct from any other Penn State course, and what is the content that would be covered in this course to make it this course. So following the idea of the 80-20 rule, which is that of course needs to be 80% similar amongst different operating. There's another webinar link there, something that was more focused on the integrative studies courses, which is not necessarily recertification, but it is all getting walked into one. And then on the far left are some websites, the Gen Ed website, the Senate website, and then the sites.phu.edu la, that's the liberal arts curriculum website. They put together a whole list of resources that I think other units will see as useful. And it was all put together by Susie Lin, who's currently one of the vice chairs of curricular fairs. She's been able to put more samples, more sample proposals up there. So this is a really busy slide, but it's helpful to look at the overall flow of the curriculum process, and just to kind of get a sense of where all the different approvals are. It's kind of unique in that every unit has a different process. So between one and two and three can be quite different depending on where you're coming from. But in general, faculty proposal course or course change, the AS for consultation, it goes to their units for approval. And then there are three signatories that are required on a curricular proposal, or your curricular affairs rep, a department head, and the dean's representative for EMS. So for EMS, I think that's a bet. Once you have all of that, then it goes to curricular affairs. At campuses, that stuff often includes a stop at their own Senate. Departmental, I'm sorry, a college level committee in some colleges. I don't believe that occurs in EMS. Perhaps at some point in the future that might happen here. So there's a little bit of flexibility depending on where you're coming from for one, for two, three, or four. And then once it's at curricular affairs, it needs to go to a subcommittee. So the subcommittees are Gen Ed subcommittee. Any of the special designations is a USIL subcommittee right across the curriculum. First year, not that first. Anyways, so any of the special designations on a course have a subcommittee with you. So that means that you need a minimum of two weeks prior to any deadline for it to go through a subcommittee there. Again, this is a lot of small print, so you can look at it at your leisure afterwards. But the flow is generally there. At the end of curricular affairs approves it. I've been getting questions about what if things don't get approved and very rarely do things not get approved. They may have to go through several iterations and there might be some compromise and those are typically more programs than in courses. But usually eventually things get approved. There does need to be a provost and then there used to be a technical beauty approval now it's a very official rubber stamp. No question. All right, you can go for it. This is a set of the dates. This was from this academic year. And the proposal due date on the far left column is the date that you would want the proposal to be at the Senate office for the meeting in the far right column. But for recertification it needs to go through at least one subcommittee so you need it two weeks prior to that deadline. So I put notes on that on the Gen Ed website, but it's worthwhile knowing that that's an absolute drop dead date due date. That is not the day to get into the curriculum system or anything like that. Here, Susie's actually said three weeks prior. Technically it's two weeks. So if a course does not, if I have a Gen Ed course and I don't do any of this, what happens to that course then. Oh, and a year and a half you'll get notice that says you really intend to not recertify this course. And if the answer is yes, you just want to drop the Gen Ed designation, then the curricular affairs is planned is to look at if that impacts any other units. If it's just truly a Gen Ed course that's not required by any major anything that's not a big deal. And then it will just get dropped. The designation will get dropped. If it's a designation on a course that a lot of people use as a Gen Ed, I don't know, like I'll be ridiculous. They'll take the GN off of 10-1-10. Absolutely. That's unrealistic, but you know that would have to go through lots of deliberations. That course is so widely used in so many majors as a Gen Ed and lots of other things. I have a related question. If a University Park department is no longer actively offering Gen Ed course, but another campus may be offering it. Is University Park obligated to initiate recertification? No, that campus can do the recertification. So that example has come up especially around the STS courses where for lots of reasons they were largely created and administratively put under UP colleges, but are largely offered exclusively at campuses now. So in most cases, they just said, you know, if you've been offering it, initiate it. Yeah, there's another example. In education, there was a course that was developed here and I was used only at Abbey 10 or somewhere else. Are there any current Gen Ed courses that for some reason would be exempt from needing to go through this process? No. So we have used, and for lots of reasons, we have used expedited processes for many previous recertifications of other things. So I, for a separate project, looked through all of the old proposals that we have on probably two of our most popular courses. It's like 100. There have been many updates in expedited forms that course, but the original proposals are so old and the expedited forms required such little content. We do not have learning objectives for any of those courses. So then, yeah, that leads to a whole series of concerns. Now, I'm sure that individual faculty members may and even disciplinary communities do, but we do not have anything on books. So if somebody was to argue the ED20 rule, there's just nothing there. So if we have all that, we're doing changes. Do we have to do consultation? If you already have that on the books. Right, we're just doing a recertification. So it's a time to make sure all those fields are complete and yes. And so you got to go through recertification. You got to do consultation just as you're recertified. Yes. We have a course. Because it impacts everybody who's teaching that course. The recertification? Well, it wouldn't impact. Basically you're recertifying so there's no impact, right? Well, but it's the alignment with the new learning objectives. It's the alignment with the revised domain criteria. It's, so it's all getting lumped under recertification, but it's cleaning up lots of things. So we have a course in Geoscience, Geoscience 20. It's taught as a continuing ED course. We in the department need to recertify that, even though it's not taught by any of the faculty members in our department. We don't know what's taught at the campuses. It's just not taught here. Because it's only taught as continuing ED. At UP, it's only taught as continuing ED. It's offered at the campuses as an actual. And there's a faculty member that's been teaching the course, but they're not. So in the reality of things, it doesn't matter where the recertification comes from. So if there's a campus who really. But it needs to come from an academic unit. It needs to come from an academic unit and continuing ED is not an academic unit. Okay, you can go ahead. I started. I mentioned most of the next couple slides already, but. Recertification collaborative amongst the disciplinary communities. So I guess this kind of goes a little bit with David's question. Especially in courses where we're changing anything. Whole groups of faculty teaching that course, and they can't be left out of the process of society. Is it changing? How is it changing? Or even if it's. They just ultimately just need to be notified that things are changing. So consultation amongst disciplinary communities, disciplinary community. Think of it as people who actively teach in earth. Or Geo side. And the person, there's no person like that at a campus and that's fine. But if there is, then we should be trying to include that. What if there is not a regular faculty. It's always adjunct. And not. So if they're adjuncts. There's, you know, that's all the campuses are, or less hesitant to require, or they're hesitant to require consultation. Mostly because contracts are temporary. And that, but if it's saying. If it's not a tenure track faculty member, but it's a member who's been there teaching for a long time. You know, campuses haven't been giving, been given tenure track positions, even Phil. So. To just say because they're not tenure track is not. No, that was the question. But adjuncts. Yes. But even for short time. Yeah. Right. So that's not possible. And now, and actually the campuses don't want us to involve them because that involve, you know, implies a lot more commitment. But is there somebody else at that campus? Yes. Yeah. The ADs usually, because they want to know the changes. So that when they hire somebody on that f t two, they can say, Oh yeah, there's a new proposal on that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So. Division has a good strategy for the. Five campus colleges. For university college, there's the disciplinary, they call it disciplinary communities. It's a different usage of the term, but because they break it out as humanities. They have different groupings. Yeah. So actually. Most of those are also on the liberal arts website. And I, I'll put, I'll put it on the gen ed website too. Okay. We'll move down. To the next slide. Yeah. Right. So. The job aid on the gen ed website and the knowledge base document for the curriculum system. But it's all online at curriculum. And then you'll profit different series of questions depending on your answers. So which domain, whether or not it's going to be integrative studies or all of that. Go to the next slide. So this is a kind of a generic, what makes a complete course proposal. The. The general. Evidence of adequate and complete consultation. So on genetic courses, if you only talk to university. That's going to be a flag. Just in general, because it's gen ed. And you can full stir your consultation response. There is a field about consultation. So it helps that you put in there kind of your rationale for how you picked the songs. Like. So like one is CAMHS, like CAMHS courses, this is a little interesting here, CAMHS courses generally are offered outside of the University front. So CAMHS is, you know, from say, of all of our 35 direct courses, how many they have, you know, there's a history of a couple being taught at this campus, so we consulted at this campus, we also consulted with, you know, the primary historian at these two campuses. So you could say something like, Earth courses have a history of being taught X, Y, and Z, we consulted with those locations, or if you're doing something like a 400 level course, you know, this is a unique 400 level general education targeted to a subpopulation of students that is only half University but it helps if you put your rationale in there. You will be justified, so if you make an academic change, like that's if you change a prerequisite or something, it needs to be justified. Something that faculty have commented on when completing proposals is that there seems to be a lot of redundancy in the field. How do we best address that? It's going to be, it's going, yes, and it's going to be addressed in the new curriculum system. No one wants to feel left out of new systems. We're delaying, we're delaying, I'm trying to get it delayed as long as possible. I know why the university purchased it. Oh, it's off the shelf. Yay. Is it related to the curriculum project? It is. The same software? Yeah, so they were, so they're, so that they work together, we've got the curriculum system that is off the top. So will that replace what's in my bag? Will that replace what's in mine? The formatting for the catalog is. The bulletin, the bulletin will, the bulletin is going to replace the course catalog. It will not replace the course schedule, right? Right. And the fields, so this system that we purchased, which is called Course Leap, and then this is the Kim. They work with campus solutions, so they, they know campus solutions and they have, they have their own version of campus solutions that they test everything for. Will it replace my bag? That cattle, you answered it. Okay. That catalog part that is just a total mess. Yes. That listing, when you go to a subject and there are 15 versions of the same course, you don't know which one to click on. Yes, that is going to be better with the bulletin. Now what's not that better is the course entries and descriptions. So when things merged from Isis to Leipa, several fields just got pushed and that's the technical term. So we're, they're looking at ways of cleaning up that data, but, and what's actually prompting that is it looks, it looks bad now, but it just kind of also is in a really bad format. So you don't know what part is worse. But when you're in a good format, like it's going to look like in the bulletin, the bad content jumps out at you even worse and even more dramatically. So they're looking at ways of cleaning that up, but you can't clean up the bulletin without cleaning up line path because it's a direct need. So you need to clean up the source data. So you can skip to the next slide. Oh, skip. Well, so this, I mentioned the sample syllabus, some of the areas that the curricular affairs is really looking at. There is the sample template on the genetic website. But then again, large sections of what you would normally include is the syllabus that are not there. That's either very instructor-specific or in spoiler play content. This is, so these are some of the main heading areas under the genet section where you need to address places where there's been hiccups is in describing how a knowledge domain or a learning objective is being accomplished in the course rather than just saying, oh, curricular affairs gets a lot of, well, this is a history course. Of course, it's whatever course. And it needs to be a bit cleaner articulation of how the course is maybe the learning objective or the knowledge domain. Actually, at the end of this PowerPoint, there's a way that I mapped out, like if you have well-written course objectives, how you can map your course objectives to the learning objectives and the domain criteria. So that presumes well-written course objectives, but many faculty have those. So that you probably already have a good sense of if you can do that mapping, how your course is doing this in a pretty straightforward way. You can skip to the next slide, move to the next slide. So these are some points that were put together by Michelle and Susanna. Anytime the proposal asks for assessment, there are examples, but a cleaner layout of, you know, just an explanation of how a specific assessment would be able to measure a learning objective. I have found this is much more straightforward for online courses because they've been developed in a more structured way. The next slide is the Gen Ed domain criteria. So this is how course is either arts, humanities, social science, things like that. But it's basically you just need to do the same thing. So consultation. This is some of the standard recommendations for consultation. There's actually a senate report that David wrote on consultation. It was a committee, but it's the standard by which the consultation recommendations are made. You know, some places have, what it really gets down to is content. So finding discipline. So finding persons with the right area of background. And that no college owns a course. It's a university course. No college owns a domain. That's been attempted recently. And and so that it's just really looking out for, this is ways of helping to improve problems with curricular redundancy and just in general making sure people are informed. Although it's not an information system. It's not like spam everybody with curricular consultation. That's not the strategy either. It's really about getting informed input from somebody who could possibly be teaching the course or has something constructed. So really looking at where courses have been taught in the last several years and the curriculum just to provide you with that. Anywhere that's offering programs with similar content, especially if there's a major at other campuses. If you're changing a pre-rec, the units that offer that pre-rec. So if you're going to remove a math pre-rec or add a math correct and math community. And then there's these other ideas that kind of bridge large portions of the university. Entrepreneurship, innovation, sustainability. Like nobody owns those words. Don't forget librarians. They're a really helpful resource. I was just going to say too, this is just something I've learned over the years, that if you're going to ask somebody for consultation, I always send them an email outside and just say, hey, I'm going to be sending a course your way. Are you the right person to talk to? And our response rate for consultation is almost 100 percent because we do that. Sometimes they say, yep, send it my way. Sometimes they say a better person is a person. Sometimes they say, I'm on sabbatical. I'm not, you know, I'm not doing any of that. And so, you know, just kind of letting everybody know kind of outside the system that I mean, they get emails. The system sends them emails, but that way you get to the right person and they know it's coming and they know you're watching, right? So you don't get these default acceptance things. All right. So who is doing what? Earlier this academic year in, I don't know if it was August or September, all of the AQ deans got a list of general courses. Yeah, that was the one I referenced earlier. Yeah. And Michelle Duffy's been putting, she'll probably, if she hasn't, does she send anyone for that? And they've sent you. Yeah. And now, I have my update. Okay. Michelle Duffy has intended to share an updated list every month or so, but so big disciplinary communities are difficult to coordinate. So the Office for General Education and the Learning Outpost Assessment Office are doing work to try and encourage them to coordinate. So did some things with the psych community as a model, we're trying some other things with sociology. But if you have a big community that you want to try and get together, we'll do like that. And then when you're asked to consult, please consult, but be collegial about it. So, you know, so collegial feedback from people, especially when I saw some feedback from a campus, I was like, oh, his office isn't two doors down from hers, that's not so nice. It's okay to differ. And so even okay to say no, I disagree because of X, Y, and Z, but we all know how difficult that is. You know, one of the things I think hinders consultation is people are fearful of this negative feedback. And not because they're not willing to take constructive input. It's just if it's not being done in a cultural way that people kind of defer to avoiding it. Okay. So the last three slides are all on integrated studies courses. That's not really recertification. Could be if you're taking an existing course and making it those questions. And you mentioned earlier that there's now an H possibility on the course. Yes. My understanding from the Senate office is they have decided to double up on two suffixes. They will have Ns for inter-domain, Zs for length, and you want to add an H to those. They're hoping that there's not many examples of that. If it's either of those, then they could use the T and F. I think our time is just about up unless there's any other questions in the room. I don't see any questions online. We will post the recording on our Dutton Food for Thought series. And we'll put that as well at that spot as well. But we very much appreciate you coming and spending your time.