Examination of general education

This endorsement is based on Interinstitutional Faculty Senate's commitment to the goal, shared by JBAC, CIA, the OUS Provosts' Council and the Community Colleges Presidents' Council, of improving student progress to the Bachelor's degrees while maintaining the quality of the degree.

In providing its endorsement, the IFS wishes to emphasize that the OTM addresses only one impediment to progress to the Bachelor's degree, the transferability of credits among all community colleges and OUS institutions, and it does so without direct evidence of the magnitude of the contribution that this impediment makes to slowing progress to the Bachelor's degree. The IFS endorsement is provided with the expectation that such evidence will be collected and used in the assessment of the effectiveness of the OTM.

Accompanying documents from the JBAC, from the CIA, from  the Provost's Council, and from the IFS all state that effective implementation of the Oregon Transfer Module must be accompanied by effective academic advising. The IFS proposes immediate examination of academic advising at each of the community college and OUS campuses to be followed by concrete proposals and cost estimates for maximizing academic advising.

These documents submit that effective general education should be defined by its outcomes rather than completion of a specific number of courses or credits. The IFS endorses this goal and proposes immediate initiation of a collaborative process to define those outcomes. The IFS further endorses an examination of general education courses at each community college and OUS institution for the extent to which they produce the desired outcomes, and modification of the general education programs as needed.

Personal contacts of IFS faculty with students in the classroom, studio, laboratory and academic advising sessions leave faculty with the impression that adequately prepared students encounter few problems with completing the courses required by a major once they have accurate information about the major requirements. Our collective experience indicates that time to the Bachelor's degree is much more negatively impacted by inaccurate academic advising, inadequate skills and background for success in a major, and outside obligations that prevent full and effective participation in a university education. Independent support for some of these impressions is found in "Measuring Up 2004Ó (http://measuringup.highereducation.org) and in documents posted on the OUS Board's Excellence in Delivery and Productivity web site (http://www.ous.edu/workinggroups/EDP/work/AverageEducationAttainment2002.pdf). Both sources show Oregon to be far below top states in Preparation of High School l students and Persistence of Community College students, and in a much stronger position with respect to Retention of OUS Students and the Proportion of OUS Students that complete a degree within six years.

The IFS proposes that, rather than embarking on a discipline by discipline and institution to institution attempt to devise a common lower division core for each major, as advocated in the statement of the Community College Presidents' Council, more students will be affected more rapidly with better results by taking the advice in the JBAC, CIA and OUS Provosts' Council documents to immediately improve advising, to evaluate the reasons that students "swirl", and to define system wide General Education outcomes.

The IFS expresses its gratitude to those who have been devoted to producing the Oregon Transfer Module. We are indebted to them, and strongly endorse the OTM that they have generated.