Sometime during the first week of September, thousands of students like Emma Landry-Kaufmann officially became part of a bold experiment five years in the making: reinventing what it means at Eastern Michigan University to be college educated.

This fall’s freshmen are the first wave of participants in the new General Education program. Like every alumnus with an undergraduate degree from EMU, today’s EMU students are required to take certain types of courses outside their majors and minors. Doing so is grounded in the ideal of a liberal education, in which being college educated means having a broad array of educational experiences. Many older alumni remember this required-course rite by a different name: the Basic Studies program.

But for the past five years, EMU’s academic community has rethought the current process and its related set of requirements. This semester, Landry-Kaufmann gets to take it for a test drive. And she is up to the challenge.

“I hope to be able to grow as a person,” said Landry-Kaufmann, 18, a 2007 graduate of Ypsilanti High School. “I want to be able to make changes for myself and be comfortable with them.” As far as the nuts and bolts of General Education – its five subject areas, course options and the like – the process is an abstract concept to her and probably all other freshmen. But she’s already thinking like an open-minded person – a college-educated person – even before stepping into a classroom.

“I hope as a result of going to college, I’ll be more excited about and accepting of change,” she said.

Landry-Kaufmann’s frame of mind is the canvas that architects of the new General Education program – formally titled “Education for Participation in the Global Community” – were focused on as they set out to rethink how undergraduates at EMU are educated.

The new General Education program replaces the current Gen Ed system, which has been in place since 1990. The revised program has four major goals that bring the program more in line with educational advancements and today’s world: better prepare students to participate in a “global community” and become informed world citizens; provide explicit outcomes-based learning by helping faculty create learning experiences that help students meet these outcomes; encourage lifelong learning; and create an EMU community by focusing on curricular and co-curricular experiences in order to give students a greater sense of community before, during and after graduation.

EMU’s rethinking of General Education comes at a time of rising national interest in outcomes-based learning and a revisiting of undergraduate curriculums in response to a greater push for accountability. The issue of accountability was a focus of a 2006 federal report titled, “A National Dialogue: The Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education.” Throughout its deliberations, the federal commission examined the issue of how to devise ways to measure how well public colleges and universities are preparing students academically.

“This has been a movement for the past 15 years,” said Christopher Gardiner, a professor in EMU’s Department of Mathematics and chairman of the General Education program’s course-vetting committee. “I think EMU has been at the forefront of assessment as a gauge of effectiveness, particularly through its accreditation process. With that said, how would you assess the old General Education program or the old Basic Studies program? The answer is, you wouldn’t. Now we want to, just as this big move toward accountability is coming along. The idea of assessment is a nationwide thing and is reaching into a lot of the recesses of our operations. To me, it makes total sense."

The new program organizes all Gen Ed courses into five areas: Effective Communication, Quantitative Reasoning, Perspectives on a Diverse World, Knowledge of the Disciplines, and Learning Beyond the Classroom. Perhaps most importantly for students, the number of required Gen Ed credits a student must take is now 40, down from 50. (An EMU course is typically three credits.) By having students take fewer required courses, architects of the new General Education see a potential bonanza for students: more latitude to try electives, take on a second minor or pursue a certificate program. “All programs should see this as an opportunity to attract students to take electives with them,” said Chris Foreman, director of the General Education Program and a professor in the Department of Communication and Theatre Arts.

For Robert Perry, a professor in the Department of African American Studies since 1997 and the department’s former chairman, the Gen Ed changes are welcome, overdue and in the best interests of students.

“When I arrived, it did not appear we had any definition of what Basic Studies was or what general studies were,” he said. “My comment back then was that it lacked cohesion, and didn’t ensure that a student was generally educated.”
“I saw it immediately. I said, ‘What is this?’ What is it a student needs to know that isn’t going to go out of style, that isn’t going to be technology-driven, for example?” he said. “What is it going to take to make a student artistically, scientifically and humanities literate? In my opinion, you need to be literate in the basic areas of study.”

Work on the new program started in the fall of 2001, when the General Education Reform Committee was formed. The group started meeting regularly in 2002 and presented its first draft about two years later. The EMU Board of Regents endorsed the revised program in January 2005.

A major characteristic of the new program is its adherence to outcomes-based learning. EMU literally has a thousand-plus courses being offered or available to be offered at any time. Most are upper-level courses for students in a particular major or minor. But only courses reviewed and approved by the General Education Vetting Committee can be called Gen Ed courses. In other words, Gen Ed courses pass through an additional series of reviews. Peer reviewers from the faculty are looking to see how well a professor has organized the course, such that what is taught can be measured, and that the content itself is assessed against the outcomes from one of the five areas. “All courses approved as Gen Ed courses have either been specifically designed to meet the outcomes or have been significantly reworked to fit with the national trend towards accountability,” Foreman said. The course-vetting committee has approved more than 130 existing or new courses as Gen Ed courses.

Faculty involved in the new Gen Ed program realize that saying a course is outcomes-based and actually proving it are not the same. “We are not in any way fully converted to the outcomes-based learning culture that I think is coming,” Gardiner said. “Being asked to sit down and think about your course in this context is quite an experience. You learn more about your course and, through it, very possibly create a stronger course.”

Perry agreed. “Our new system is defined in a way that everyone has to address these questions that are part of the outcomes,” he said. “But you can’t just say you met it. You need to show how.”

That’s part of the puzzle still coming into shape. Another committee will take up the role of assessing the success of courses: Were the outcomes met and how?

Another hallmark of the program is its emphasis on interdisciplinary course development. In fact, architects hope the combination of an outcomes-based approach to learning promotes more cross teaching and course development among faculty in EMU’s 32 departments and schools across its five primary colleges. “We’ve really looked at General Education as an incentive to promote interdisciplinary cooperation,” Foreman said.

One such example is a course titled, “Reason and Revolution,” which looks at art, philosophy, literature and history related to the Enlightenment period across Europe. While courses from individual departments may have touched on the other areas at some level, this course integrates them as never before – and has outcomes-based learning built into it.

Gardiner, Foreman, Perry and others admit that the transition to the new program will encounter bumps. For all but the 2,500 or so incoming freshmen and hundreds of more transfer students, the old Gen Ed requirements remain in effect. In essence, EMU has two programs running in parallel. Last year’s freshmen will graduate using the old standards and requirements; the new freshmen adhere to the new ones. Having a dual system, at least for a few years, is placing added work on academic advisers in departments – usually, senior-level professors with the most knowledge of the curriculum as well as the ins and outs of the admission and credit-transfer process.

“The transition is going to be complex, but in 1990 we went through the same transition when we switched from Basic Studies to Gen Ed,” Gardiner said. “We switched to a system that was much more specific in terms of courses.”

Perry said the payoff is worth all the sacrifice. “We’re not going to lose anything by this experiment,” he said.