The Academic Leadership Team (ALT) meeting of February 2012 dealt with two topics: reprioritization of the graduation requirement discussion list and initial discussions of aligning the co-op program more closely with academics. 

 The reprioritized graduation requirements list is:

•  residency requirements / semester credit hours
• 50% transfer credits
• academic outcomes for co-op
• capstone design courses must be taken at WIT
• research requirement
• minors and double degrees
• must pass all courses in the curriculum unless otherwise approved by academics
• research methods class
• computer science requirement
•  
• First Year Seminar (FYS)
•  
• no math or English requirements in graduate programs
• 100% of master’s/professional certification courses must be taken at WIT; i.e., no transfer credit is allowed

 The first two items were discussed and recommendations given to the deans and provosts for development into a recommended policy.  Their recommendations will be discussed in a later blog posting as part of the summary of the ALT April offsite meeting.  The three items with strikethrough, research requirement, research methods class, and computer science requirement, were ideas that the ALT put on the discussion list last year.  The current consensus appears to be that while all three are reasonable ideas, adding more requirements as we restructure our curricula is probably not a good idea.  I think all three will be removed from the list at the next ALT meeting in early June.  First Year Seminar (FYS) is a topic that requires a lot of collaboration between the student affairs staff and the academic staff.  Since student affairs is not usually represented at the ALT meetings, the ALT decided that this topic is best discussed by a separate committee composed of members from both student affairs and academics.  Chuck Hotchkiss and Annamaria Wenner are co-chairing a committee that has been tasked with reviewing FYS.  The last two items on the list deal with graduate program requirements and are best handled by the Graduate Programs Committee and not by the ALT. 

 The need for better alignment of academics and the co-op program is represented schematically in the attached file, Coop Configurations.  At the present time, the majority of our students have an optional co-op after the sophomore year.  The first required co-op is in Spring of the junior year and the second required co-op is in Fall of the senior year.  The linkages between the co-ops and the academic programs are generally weak, as indicated by the dashed lines in the current model in the figure.  It would be better to have strong linkages as shown in the integrated model.  The alignment of the co-ops with the semesters before and after them would lead to a better all-around educational experience for our students. 

 The discussion by the ALT was both collegial and constructive.  There was general agreement that three areas need additional development.  First, a more robust assessment system for co-op is needed, especially as related to academic outcomes.  Second, better “local representation,” that is, more direct involvement of the departments with co-op, would be beneficial.  Third, since there are no students on the ALT, a student survey and meetings with student focus groups would generate data that could be used during subsequent meetings.

 Additional discussion of the alignment of academics and co-op will be the topic of my next blog posting.

Best Regards,
Russ

Coop Configurations