General Education Committee Minutes, 4/23/14
Members present: S. Caro, L. Calderon, M Cracolice, A. Dresselhaus, K. Huthaily J.
Randall, T. Squires, N. White
Ex-officio Members present: B. Howard, N. Hinman
Members Absent/ Excused: E. Uchimoto, K. Reiser, T. Shearer
Guest: S. Bradford
The minutes from 4/16/14 were approved.
Business Items

The following courses were approved for Literary and Artistic Studies.
LIT 349L
LIT 350L
LIT 378L
RUSS 306L
RUSS 307L
Medieval Literature
Chaucer
Gay and Lesbian Studies
Russian Literature I
Russian Literature II
The instructor of LIT 342 opted to remove the general education designation.
Follow-up is pending for NASX 235 and GRMN 322. Notice will be sent to the
instructors to resubmit in the fall.

Consideration of the follow-up responses from Indigenous and Global was postponed.
Camie will verify which courses have revised forms.

The Committee discussed how to proceed with assessment. It recommended
additional items be included in the chair’s assessment summary to report that the
Committee is making progress. The change to the general education form will initiate
collection of metrics. The committee may see similarities in the responses and then
could look at a possible rubric and how to collect associated student work. An
obvious issue will be who will oversee collecting, organizing, and analyzing the
materials. Resources will be necessary to conduct authentic assessment.
UM is much larger and more complex than Eastern Oregon, whose assessment of
General Education was commended by the NWCCU. Other institutions
with successful Gen Ed assessment have made additional investment in software.
UM could look into this possibility. Other institutions have addressed have also
required multi-year strategies to study the options, obtain faculty buy-in, develop
rubrics, conduct and evaluate pilot projects, etc. UM is in a similar process.
A start would be to create perhaps 4 learning goals for each group that are assessable.
The needed structural changes should evolve during this process. Course grades are
not used in program assessment because the learning goals are specific to the course
not the program.
The Committee will need to think about clear instructions and samples of how to fill
out the assessment question on the form.
The meeting adjourned at 5:25