End-of-Academic Year
Second and Final General Education (GE) Committee Report
2014-2015 Faculty Congress
General Education Committee
Name of Committee
Names of Chair and Committee
Members
List of Committee Meeting Dates and
Times
List of Committee Initiatives,
Directives, and Tasks to Address
throughout the Academic Year
Faculty Congress General Education Committee
Michael Bitter, Chair
Karla Hayashi, GE Committee Member
Thora Abarca, GE Committee Member
Yumik Ohara, GE Committee Member
Amy Saxton, GE Committee Member
Jeffrey Smith, GE Committee Member
Armando Garcia-Ortega, GE Committee Member
Due to the nature and volume of the GE re-certification
process, the General Education Committee has conducted
it business Online this academic year. Course applications
are received at the uhhgened@hawaii.edu web address
and organized and transferred by the Chair to a Dropbox
account that is then shared with all the GE Committee
members. The courses are then discussed via email among
the GE Committee members. The GE Committee has
worked throughout the summer and into the Fall Semester
of 2015 to ensure that as many courses are recertified for
General Education as possible. The final, most
problematic, group of courses forced the GE Committee to
continue its work through October of 2015. A final list of
GE certified courses for the 2016-2021 certification period
was submitted to the UHH Registrar’s Office on November
12, 2015.
The GE Committee set out to recertify for the 2016-2021
period almost 200 currently certified GE courses, as
required by the UH Hilo General Education Program. In
addition, the Committee received twenty-two additional,
new GE certification applications.
List of Committee Accomplishments
throughout the Academic Year
List of Committee Initiatives,
Directives, and Tasks Remaining to
Address for the Next Academic Year
The Faculty Congress General Education Committee has
certified and recertified 205 courses during the 2014-2015
academic year, between nine and ten times the number of
courses certified in an average year. Only ten courses were
removed from all GE certification status, all of those at the
request of the specific department and/or faculty
instructor. The GE Committee worked very hard to ensure
that as many courses retained their GE certification as
possible, thereby reducing the level of confusion among
faculty and students that results from a given course being
certified, and then not certified thereafter. In addition, the
GE Committee worked to build consensus on a decision to
place ALL remaining GE certified courses on the same
certification schedule. This resulted in reassigning the
terminal year of all remaining GE courses to 2021. This
change will obviate the necessity to recertify a group of
new courses each and every year. Therefore, the next
major period of recertification will not take place until the
year before the fall semester of 2021. This change will
significantly reduce the workload associated with the
General Education Program on the part of future GE
Committees and the UH Hilo faculty over the next five
years.
A number of issues regarding the current GE Program have
been discussed this year and may be addressed by future
GE Committees. These include the possibility of
designating GE courses as such in each semester’s Class
Schedule in an effort to avoid student and faculty
confusion. This system is used at UH Manoa, but the
current functionality of UH Hilo’s banner access and the
understaffing of the Registrar’s Office prevents our campus
from developing a similar system of GE certification
identifiers for each course in every academic semester.
Discussion of such issues with the Registrar’s Office has
exposed the limits of our current UHH technology when it
comes to what appear to be simple solutions. Perhaps the
factors preventing such change from taking place can be
overcome in future years with the direction of the GE
Committee. As it stands, these, and other, issues have
very difficult solutions and appear to require resources and
technology that are not currently available at UH Hilo.
Please attach all meeting minutes or notes, as well as documentation of accomplishments.