College Committees – Curricular Affairs – End of Year Report

Final Report of the Behrend Curricular Affairs Committee for Academic Year 2020-2021

Members: Angela Davis, Lisa Elliott (Chair), Melanie Ford, Alan Jircitano, Jodie Styers, Ibrahim Naseem, Justyna Skomra, Zachary Williams

Purpose: The Curricular Affairs Committee reviews and evaluates all course and curriculum proposals submitted by the Schools of the College. It studies and reviews all existing courses and curricula of the College and maintains liaison with the College administration and faculty as necessary for the implementation of the procedures outlined in the Guide to Behrend College Curricular Procedures. The Curricular Affairs Committee maintains and makes available the Guide to Behrend College Curricular Procedures which provides instructions for submitting course and curriculum proposals. The policies and procedures in the Guide to Behrend College Curricular Procedures are subject to the approval of Faculty Council and are to be consistent with the University Faculty Senate's Guide to Curricular Procedures.

Meetings:

  • 10/2/20 – virtual meeting – organizational meeting with a request to review duplicate courses and how to reach out.
  • 12/04/20 – virtual meeting – reviewed the duplicate courses and discussed accreditation issues.
  • 3/1/21 – virtual meeting – reviewed current proposals and discussed them.

Review of Progress:

Charge 1

(Standing Charge) The committee continues to make specific recommendations to the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs regarding proposals for the creation, revision, and discontinuance of programs and courses at Behrend.

  • (completed in 2020)
  • We recommended that each school adopt the online form that the School of Science uses. In addition, we recommended that the form includes a link to the process for each school. We recommended that there is a reset button on the form in case the person needs to submit more than one proposal. We recommended that this link be published on the Behrend Faculty and Staff resources page or to the BD intranet.
  • Bill Gonda incorporated the link on the Faculty and Staff resources page under Academic Resources.

Charge 2

Streamline course offerings – look at how many times courses are duplicated in the bulletin.

  • Course offerings were reviewed by the committee at each school by the representative for that school contacting the program chairs.
  • We accumulated a list of courses in all programs that responded. The spreadsheet is located in the Teams folder.
  • It was determined that the Music course that was submitted was a course that needed an updated description if the faculty felt that these courses were different
  • It was also determined that in the remaining cases, program accreditation required that these courses reside in these disciplines, although they are similar to a course in another discipline.
    • PSYCH 212 and HDFS 129 – Education accreditation
    • PSYCH 200, EDPSY101, STAT 200, SCM 200, PLET 227, IE 323, ME 345W – Engineering accreditation, discipline-specific analyses and research methods, and different prerequisites needed for each discipline.

Charge 3

  • Create a uniform approach to submitting curricular proposals in all four schools. (All four schools' processes uploaded to Box, no further action has been taken as requested during the Faculty Senate meeting on 2/10/20).
  • Updated: Those processes have been migrated to Teams 2/19/2021.

Suggested charges for next year:

  • Charge 1 (Standing Charge). The committee continues to make specific recommendations to the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs regarding proposals for the creation, revision, and discontinuance of programs and courses at Behrend.
  • Charge 2. Discover and document best practices for the committee.
  • Charge 3. Document a “what happens to my proposal next” document that extends the current workflow documents and explains the role of different leadership teams and SCCA.
  • Charge 4. Provide templates for each possible curricular changes and share them on the Behrend Faculty Resources page:
    1. course change
    2. program change
    3. new course, new program
    4. recertification of a course as a gen ed
    5. certification of a course as a W course.

Submitted by:

Lisa Jo Elliott
College Curricular Affairs Committee, Chair