Academic Affairs Open Meeting

The agenda for this meeting is to collect input on four complex areas of Academic Affairs oversight that will need action over the coming summer months. Those four areas are:

1. Special Topics courses: How to share these opportunities? How to maximize opportunities for evolving curricula? What approaches can balance our curricular creativity with the limitations of our course numbering infrastructure? How can we use these for the greatest impact in strategically significant areas for the school?

2. TAs and hourly graders: How to assign these limited resources? Based on what criteria? What are reasonable exceptions? How can we meet our obligations to students while diligently following guidelines for these different employment categories?

3. Building space and meetings: how to balance meeting space needs with course space needs? Even with faster course planning, we have outgrown our space for courses. What can we do to meet our need for readily available meeting space while reducing costs in staff time spent on space management?

4. Regularizing courses: Given Courseleaf system requirements, attached, how should the Curriculum Committee and Program committees provide for rigorous and fair review of courses? What can Academic Affairs provide to assist in the regularization of courses, particularly for our high numbers of 490s and 590s (in future 498s and 598s)?

More context on each of these issues as well as an overview of the session (printouts will be provided)

The development of the undergraduate curriculum remains a key issue. The goal remains to have invitations to faculty to develop or review the first 7 required courses and the first 13 electives by May 1.

Questions? Contact Kate McDowell