Message from Provost Chapman
Dear Colleagues:
I would like to ask your assistance in gathering information about the University Core Curriculum. This information will be used as part of MSU's accreditation review by the Northwest Association of Colleges and Universities, which begins Fall '97. It will also be used as part of a review by my office to identify ways to make Core courses more valuable both to students and faculty. It is not a evaluation of you or other faculty members, but a way of identifying both strong points of the current Core organization, and barriers - financial, facility, or curricular - that make it difficult for you to achieve the goals you set for your Core course.
To make this task as easy as possible for you, and to make it possible to quickly collate the information about more than 150 Core courses, this interactive Web page has been activated on the MSU network. This document will ask you to make judgments about the degree to which each Core objective has been met given the students you have, and the current conditions under which you and your colleagues teach. Responses to the rating scale questions will be pooled and will form part of the accreditation report. Each question will also provide an opportunity for a short written response. These responses will be used by my office to identify places where resources, facilities, or policies might be changed to make it possible for you to increase the effectiveness of your course.
It is important that complete responses are provided by Friday, April 25, so that this task can be finished prior to the conclusion of the Spring '97 semester. I know this is a busy time for all faculty, but I ask that a special effort be made to meet this deadline. Thank you very much for your cooperation in this effort to better serve our students!
Sincerely,
Joseph A. Chapman, Provost
Survey Overview.
Structure of the survey. The survey is structured around the specific criteria approved for each Core area designation. Following a statement of each criterion, the respondent is first asked to rate the degree to which this particular criterion has been met (on a 1 to 5 scale). Next the respondent is asked to explain how this course has or has not been successful in meeting this particular criterion. Finally, the respondent is asked 2 or 3 additional questions concerning barriers to success of the course, the assessment of student outcomes, and the appropriateness of the criterion to this course.
Selected criteria for each course. The survey is designed so that each respondent is asked to respond to only those criteria that are specifically relevant to his or her course. By indicating the Core designation, in the checkboxes below, the respondent is led to the appropriate set of criteria and related questions.
One respondent per course, if possible. We are asking that only one respondent complete this survey for each Core course. We would prefer this to be either the current course director or one of the primary faculty involved in coordination and delivery of the course. We recognize that several faculty may be involved in a given course and that these individuals may play various roles. We, therefore, urge the respondent to try to synthesize, as much as possible, the views and concerns of ALL the faculty involved in this course. If there are divergent majority and minority views regarding a particular criterion, please try to express these as objectively as possible.
Saving and submitting responses. Although some may, it is unlikely that most respondents will be able to complete the entire survey in a single session. Thus, we suggest that you make a hard (paper) copy of the relevant Web pages before you begin and do your editing work using a standard word processor (e.g., Word, WordPerfect, WordPad, etc.). By saving your work in a standard text (.TXT) file, you can return to it as needed until you have completed all the questions. At that point, you can cut-and-paste your answers into the Web form. Although this may seem unnecessarily complex, it will allow you to work at your own pace and will allow us to obtain all responses in a standard electronic format.
Time commitment. We expect that it will only take about 30 minutes to fill out this form once the input of other faculty have been gathered and synthesized. The actual time may vary, however, depending on the particular Core designation, since courses in each area are expected to meet different numbers of criteria.