General Education Requirements (GER)

Well a short answer is that our accreditation requires it. But another answer is that it can be generative to connect with faculty from different departments and colleges with the shared purpose of ranking and examining student responses to our learning outcome designs. The results help us make evidence-based arguments for changes to our curriculum when that time comes.

Faculty Senate has a General Education Requirements and Core Committee and our bylaws state oversight of General Education Assessment. General Education Assessment has happened for over 20 years at UAF.

The EAGER committee welcomes all UAF faculty who would like to improve GER learning and assessment at UAF. The 2024-2025 co-chairs of EAGER are Ilana Kingsley & Sarah Stanley. Interested in joining? Send Ilana an email at imkingsley@alaska.edu

Faculty Senate adopted General Education Learning Outcomes in 2011. However, assessment of these Learning Outcomes did not happen until 2019-2020, our first pilot year. Each year, our efforts include a bifurcated focus. A small group of faculty pilots the next year's Learning Outcome while all faculty participate in the previously piloted Learning Outcome design.

The bolded text below (steps 3, 5, and 6) are automated by a database technology called Airtable.

Our tools, technologies, and system include the use of the following in a linear fashion:

1. Faculty Senate Approved Learning Outcomes
2. General Education and Core Committee Sponsored Pilots. These pilots create the rubrics and ensure inclusive learning design to prepare for scaling in the following semester.
3. All General Education Course Faculty ("X") receive an automated email to participate in that year's process.
4. Participating Students in Participating Courses (based on faculty in step 3) participate in that year's process.
5. Participating Faculty receive a list of participating students for their record keeping.
6. NEW Fall 2021: After classes and grades have been given, participating faculty received student responses, stripped of names.
7. Each Academic Year, General Education faculty are invited to score random samples from step 4.
8. EAGER, a sub-committee of the General Education and Core Committee (GERC), analyzes data and creates reports.
9. The cycle is complete once all 4 Learning Outcomes have been reviewed. In the fifth year, we are proposing to revisit aspects of our system together in a summit. The next year will begin a new cycle.

The General Education and Core Committee envisions a 5 year assessment cycle. The fifth year of a cycle would be a General Education Summit year. Summit years would allow us to engage the entire faculty on reviewing what we are learning and to propose changes to learning outcomes, rubrics, or assessment designs. It is important to assess each Learning Outcome first before we begin to change either the outcomes, the rubrics, or the designs.

To learn about patterns of tools used for General Education Assessment, the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) has published a report based on a survey of members. 87% of institutions taking the survey report that their assessment tools include "institutionally created rubrics applied to samples of student work." 38% report using a national standardized test for critical thinking. Our working group did not have the interest or resources to pay for or require a standardized national test. In 2016, UAF stopped participating in the ETS proficiency profile because low participation made the findings statistically invalid.

Nope.

The assessment committee will be using the pilot's group's designed rubric to score student responses from a random sample across the curriculum. The rubric was not designed to be used for any grading purpose. If you are interested in participating let us know. We are Faculty Driven.

We really thought about this! We thought, ok, the faculty in the pilot designs the assignment, the individual faculty member gets it out to the students either through their LMS or email. You don't have to grade it. You don't have to do anything except get it out there unless you want to do more.

Yes, but that doesn't mean that the notice reached all the people who received that email. We have many new Department Chairs and Deans who don't always communicate consistently.

This assessment item does not need to be embedded in the course, so it will not affect Quality Matters Certification on courses. It can be sent to students by email.

No. Courses and curriculum do not need to be redesigned.

No grading is involved unless you choose to. Our assumption is that giving students a completed/not completed does not require that you even see the assignments, unless you want to .

It is automated with an immediate response and they can see what the student will see.

General Education Assessment as we envision the use of student records here does not violate FERPA.

We rely on coding that pulls instructor emails from Banner and that initiates the process of using email to communicate to instructors the learning design of that semester and how they get their students to participate.

Airtable allows us to set up viewing permissions and customized views, similar to a lock on a filing cabinet.

Similarly, when it comes time to create a random sample of student responses, we can pull data from the responses in a manner that does not create privacy issues for students or connect to individual faculty.

Nothing. Our plan is to assess our assessment. If an instructor is unable to participate , we can follow up and learn what made it difficult.

You will get an email for each GER course you are teaching, each with a custom link for that course. Please fill out each form