The Chair of the General Education Committee
Final Report for the Academic Year 2015-2016
The work conducted by the GE committee chair during the academic year 2015 to 2016
extends to the following six areas: 1) improvement of the GE webpages, 2) seek a way to
improve transferring from other institution, 3) attending system-wide meetings that are
relevant to the GE issues, 4) certification of new GE courses and new GE categories, 5)
working with individual applicants of a GE course, and 6) working with the Assessment
Committee in order to assess some of the GE courses. I will provide concise details of the
each area below followed by what needs to be done during the next academic year.
ACTIVITIES FOR THE ACADEMIC YEAR 2015-2016
1) Improvement of the GE webpages
In the committee meeting in March, we discussed how to improve the GE webpages and I
met with Shelby Wong and shared the drop-down menu idea that the committee came up
with in order to make the GE pages more assessible for the students as well as teachers
and advisors. Shelby Wong discussed the idea with the people at the IT office and here’s
the outcome of this effort.
http://hilo.hawaii.edu/academics/gened/home.php
Because we have this page, older page that give the redundant information have been
eliminated in order to make the pages simpler and thus easier to manipulate.
2) Seek a way to improve transferring from other institution
In our December meeting, we discussed the possibility of aligning with Mānoa on the
Foundation and Jean Ippolito was invited to give her views on the issues. The committee
did not make a decision whether to align or not but will continue to look into feasability
of the Foundation. It was also decided that the chair will attend a meeting concerning the
Foundation and report back to the committee. Since then I have met with several
Department Chairs from HCC and UH-Hilo to discuss transfer issues including the
Foundation and possible alignment.
I have organized the workshop for the Interstate Passport Initiative at UH-Hilo, which
took place on Friday, April 15th, from 11:30-3:00 in UCB101. Its objective was to
improve graduation rates and shorten time to complete a degree. Bob Turner from the
Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education and Richard Dubanoski and Peter
Quigley from UH-Mānoa came to Hilo to conduct this workshop and answered questions
raised by the participants. I have invited the members of the GE committee at HCC as
well as UH-Hilo. In addition, an email invitation was sent out to the faculty-list of HCC
and UH-Hilo. All together, there were 16 participants and three of them were from HCC.
Throughout the year, there were numerous phone calls and emails regarding GE course as
well as transferring courses from prospective students and I have been either answering
questions myself and also referring them to relevant office and/or department chairs.
3) Attending system-wide meetings that are relevant to the GE issues
I attended the System-wide Foundations Board meeting via video poly-com in March
with Shelby Wong. The meeting was conducted by Susan Nishida from University of
Hawaii System and the main agenda items were UH Mānoa update on approved
quantitative reasoning (FQ) hallmarks and update on transition from Curriculum Central
to Kuali Student Curriculum Management.
With Shelby Wong, I attended via video poly-com the HAP (Hawaiian, Asian, and
Pacific Issues) System-wide Board meeting in April, which was conducted by Leilani
Basham, Chair of the HAP System-wide Board and Alapaki Luke, Vice-Chair of the
HAP System-wide Board. Agenda items included HAP Student Learning Outcomes
Discussion and reaffirm HAP Articulation with the Group. Both Shelby and I agreed that
was not advisable for UH-Hilo to join HAP since HPA courses focus on the intersection
of Native Hawaiian perspectives with Asian or Pacific which defers from the perspective
of HPP and thus majority of HPP courses would not qualify for HAP and it would be a
challenging task to have enough HAP courses at UH-Hilo.
4) Certification of new GE courses and new GE categories
The re-certification of 196 General Education courses originally certified for 2011-2016
and new course certifications were completed in late November 2015 with the great
guidance from the former chair of the committee. The committee re-certified and
certified 205 courses in total. In addition, the committee decided to place all remaining
GE certified courses on the same certification schedule thus reassigning the terminal year
of all remaining GE courses to 2021.
It was decided that February 19th will be the last day to apply for GE certification and
each members will be working with their unit in the solicitating and preparing of the
applications. It was noted that there are some common mistakes in the application
incluing not listing SLO, not having 5 page writing, and not listing number (instead using
an X) to identify LO that align with GE learning goals and outcomes. The committee
members were asked to share this information with their unit. They were also ask to
solicit and work with individual applicants in the application process. In the March
meeting, we discussed 21 GE applications and out of those applications, the committee
agreed to certify two of them.
5) Working with individual applicants of a GE course
The GE committee worked with individual applicants by meeting with them and
discussing how to improve their GE applications. The chair was designated to work with
all of the applicants expect one and I did meet with all of them so that I can assist them to
modify their application as well as their syllabi. Out of all of the applicants, two decided
to withdraw their application this around due to their busy schedule but all others
submitted revised application. The Committee is planned to meet in the third week of
May to certify courses with revised application and syllabus.
6) Working with the Assessment Committee to assess some of the GE courses
The Assessment committee has asked me to collect four to six 100 to 200 level GE
course for the assessment last October. Since then, I have approached several instructors
teaching such courses and met with them to explain this project. As a result, I was able to
located six professors who are willing to share the major writing assignment in their class
with us. They have agree to collect papers written by all of the students in a class for this
purpose and all of the writing assignments will be gathered after the final week in May.
PROSPECT FOR THE ACADEMIC YEAR 2016-2017
I would like to continue with the line of work I initiated the year 2015-2016 namely 1)
improvement of the GE webpages, 2) seek a way to improve transferring from other
institution, 3) attending system-wide meetings that are relevant to the GE issues, 4)
certification of new GE courses and new GE categories, 5) working with individual
applicants of a GE course, and 6) working with the Assessment committee to assess some
of the GE courses. I would like to put forth particular emphasis on working with HCC
faculty on the Interstate passport initiative and seeking a way to improve transferring
from other institutions of overall effect of improving GE courses and GE advising the
faculty.
For recruiting members for the GE committee, I had these two aims in mind: priority is
given to a person who has served in the committee previously and also I wanted to have a
member from each college. Jonathan Price who served in the committee previously and
Hazel Reece from Nursing agreed to serve this year. I requested a member from the
CoBE but could not have anyone. I also made sure that I would have a student
representative in the committee. I would like to express my sincere appreciation to the
each member of the committee for his or her work.
Karla Hayashi, CAS
Jeffrey Smith, CAS
Jonathan Price, CAS
Thora Abarca, Library
Amy Saxton, Library
Armando García-Ortega, CAFNRM
Hazel Reece, Nursing
Abraham Jose, Student representative
Respectfully submitted,
Dr. Yumiko Ohara
Chair, UH-Hilo Faculty Congress General Education Committee