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Team Name: Curricular Coherence

Team Lead: Jeffrey Gayton

Team Members: TBD

Curricular Coherence is at the heart of SOU’s RFY Project. From the overarching theme of student understanding of educational purpose, to the Major Maps, Co-Curricular Connections, the Course Design Academy, and Bridge initiatives, helping students understand the meaning, value, and interconnections of everything they do here at SOU is central. However, as noted elsewhere, RFY team members felt that trying to work on the curriculum itself was too heavy a lift for a project focused on first-year students.

At the 2017 AASCU Summer Meeting in Baltimore, West Chester University presented work they are doing that seems feasible as an RFY initiative at SOU. They developed what they call “certificate pathways” within the general education curriculum that consist of at least three courses that relate to a certain theme. Students who take all the courses within that pathway (e.g., global engagement, digital literacy, social justice, community engagement, sustainability) receive a certificate. Few, if any courses needed to be changed, because the pathways were fairly clear, at least to faculty and administrators. What this does for students is help them understand the connections across courses within a certificate pathway. Requiring co-curricular experiences as part of the certificate would help develop connections between work inside and outside the classroom.

In some ways, this approach resembles the “micro-credentials” that are offered in support of competency based education, but with more emphasis on course work. It also resembles the more career-oriented “badge” approaches, which are designed to help students articulate to employers the skills they’ve developed. The RFY team would like approval to do further research in this area, and have conversations with faculty responsible for the general education curriculum.