From: Wendorf, Craig
Sent: Wednesday, October 26, 2011 4:49 PM
To: Sage, James; Guay, Don
Cc: Psychology List
Subject: Step 6 Proposal
Importance: High
James, Don, and Other Members of the GEP Committee –
While I find Step 6 to be a very logical (albeit ambitious) assessment plan, it does represent a fairly significant increase in workload for faculty. I wanted to outline the major concerns that I have heard in discussions with other faculty.
First, although a single course may only be assessed via portfolio every five years, the reality is that many faculty teach multiple courses that fall under this proposal. As a result, they might be doing a course portfolio every other year or worse yet multiple portfolios in a given year. How can we possibly ask faculty to do this much more without some reduction in workload elsewhere?
Second, the amount of work involved is not just a function of the creation of the course portfolio. The faculty learning communities represent a big unknown at this point. What will the actual time commitment look like? I am leery about asking faculty to serve on even more committees.
Third, the proposal states that Communication in the Major and Capstone Experiences must all be assessed as well. While I don’t disagree that they should be assessed, I question if it should a requirement from a GEP perspective. Certainly the Communication and the Capstone elements are departmental, and perhaps assessment of them should fall under the governance of the departments. Combined with my first concern, now faculty may be doing multiple course portfolios most years. Yikes.
Fourth, Experiential Learning is going to be more difficult to utilize a course portfolio model. In some cases, there is no clear written product. What then would be submitted into the portfolio? And given that it’s not a credit bearing element to begin with, I wonder how appropriate the assessment model is here.
I hope the committee can provide clarity and guidance in simplifying the assessment plan and process. Though student learning is always primary, high workload of faculty is one of the major obstacles to effective teaching and learning.
Sincerely,
Craig A. Wendorf, Ph.D.
Professor and Chair of Psychology
University of Wisconsin - Stevens Point