The General Education Taskforce is continuing the long process of adapting GE 21, a new structure for general education course requirements for the 21st century.
The taskforce implanted a new structure called GE 98 13 years ago and the current system was adapted in 2000.
The taskforce first set up reports with recommendations and multiple models for a new system then sent them to other government bodies on campus to examine and revise. Two reports were released last year when stage two of the process, the data collection, began.
“Since stage two, we developed concrete models based on the faculty survey, open discussions with faculty members, and meetings with deans, few department chairs,” Fehmi Damkaci, GE 21 co-chair, said in an email.
Stage two commenced in the beginning of March, and a lot has been done since those reports came out.
“Now we’re in the process of working on these models,” said Dave Valentino, the Taskforce co-chair. “We do have a timeline that we’re working on, but in terms of what we do, it will lead to recommendations for the next group of people that will then actually do the hard part of deciding and making the real decisions about what Gen Ed will be in the future.”
Oswego State’s Gen Ed program had to be revised in 2000 because of New York state mandated changes and to keep the unity of the Gen Ed program for all SUNY schools. The taskforce is working on the GE 21 structure to keep from becoming too outdated.
“What are the needs of the graduate today as compared to a decade ago? Or two decades ago? That’s what General Education focuses on,” Valentino said.
When last year’s reports were released, students were able to give their opinions and seek solutions to any of the issues they saw in them. Student reactions are still looked at openly in the current process.
“The whole idea of higher education has changed a lot in 11 years, so they should be thinking about their general education program,” said freshman Matt Findel.
At this time, there is no definite date of when GE 21 will be established.
“We can predict it might be as early as fall 2012 or as late as fall 2013, depending the adopted model’s relation to what we have currently,” Damkaci said.
There is still a lot of the process to undergo. But it is necessary for Oswego and all SUNY students to update the system.
“To maintain the good health of any educational program, it’s worth looking at the curriculum, critically, on a regular basis,” Valentino said.
