Hi everyone and welcome to yet another edition of the VP Education exec report! I’m changing things up this time due to there not being a full article’s worth of updates. Instead, I’m going to give a short update on a couple things, and then I wanted to use the rest of my exec update this week to explain how one would go about making a change to an academic program and why it takes so long to complete the process. Soooooo let’s do this!
First up, I wanted to thank everyone those that attended or assisted with the Career Fair. The turn out was a bit lower than we hoped for but both employers and students found value in the event. If you attended, we’ll be sending out a feedback survey to ensure that we can make this a repeatable and impactful event going forward.
Second, Course Critiques have started to be conducted by professors in their classes. If you haven’t done a critique yet or don’t have a specific time scheduled, work with the professor to pick a pre-planned time so as many students can fill it out as possible. The more responses that are received, the more impact the results of the critiques will have.
Those are the two main updates I wanted to share with everyone this week, so let’s move on to talking about how making changes to programs works. The process reaches from the departments to the university and as a result takes a long time to complete. For this we’ll use the hypothetical scenario of the department of Management Sciences wanting to add a new course, MSCI 170 (this course does not actually exist).
When a department wants to propose a new course, there first needs to be a topic and an instructor willing to design the course. This instructor, along with the department, would design the content of the course and determine the assessment methods, including whether it has a final exam, tutorials, labs, the total number of lecture hours, etc. Once that has been decided we move into the land of committees.
With the development of a new course, there has to be somewhere to put it so it can be offered to students. A proposal will be presented to a committee within the department to approve where the course will go, what elective requirements it can satisfy and what the calendar description is. Once all of these things are sorted out, it can be make its way into the faculty level committees.
There are two major committees that any change like this will go through: the Faculty Undergraduate Studies Council (FUGS) and the Engineering Faculty Council (EFC). I sit on FUGS and this is where I would first see a change proposed. The President (Leila) sits on Engineering Faculty Council, which is similar to EngSoc council, except it represents the entire faculty. Before a FUGS meeting I will generally consult with the academic reps and students from the program that is experiencing changes (in this example, Management Engineering), unless the changes are trivial or housekeeping related (for example, removing a course that isn’t offered anymore from an elective list). Once our new course passes through FUGS it heads on to EFC, where generally few changes are made. The rule of thumb is that once something passes FUGS in the faculty it will not drastically change before being enacted.
After making it’s way through the faculty, our new MSCI course will enter the Senate Undergraduate Committee (UGC), another committee that I sit on. Generally, only minor changes are made at this level to the course (i.e. spelling mistakes) and from here it moves onto Senate. Senate is the highest body of the university, and our Senator Allyson will then take over from there. Once our changes pass at senate they will then be enacted in the next year’s calendar (right now we are passing the last of the changes for the 2015/2016 calendar).
So that pretty much concludes the quest of our new course until it starts being taught. I hope you all found this interesting. As always, if you have any questions, please feel free to send me an email at vpeducation.a@engsoc.uwaterloo.ca at any time.
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