Components of a General Education Program

One can think about putting together a general education program by thinking about its various components (aka considerations).  Here is a (non-exhaustive) list of components comprising the various models being proposed.

1. Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs)
   • Our current program has nearly seventy SLOs. Assessment depends on SLOs, so the fewer there are, the easier assessment will be.  Here, again, is a much smaller set of SLOs from AAC&U.
2. Total Credit Hours
   
   • How large should our general education program be?
3. Core/Foundation Courses
   
   • Is there a set of courses that every student will need to take?
   • Which courses are those?
4. Writing Intensive/Quantitative Reasoning Courses
   
   • Will there be writing intensive or quantitative courses?
5. Experiential Learning
   • Do we incorporate experiential learning into general education? If so, how?
6. “University Program” areas
   • What do we think of our current distribution areas?
   • Which courses do we think satisfy those areas?
7. Oral Communication/Transformative Dialogue?
   • How do we help our students have difficult discussions?
8. Interdisciplinary Courses
   • Do we add truly interdisciplinary courses into our program?
9. General Education Capstone
   • Do we add a capstone experience to our program?