Course Submission Guidelines

The following guidelines are meant to help faculty members create new courses or revise existing ones for the new EWU General Education Program. All GE courses must address the new Student Learning Outcomes and make them visible. These guidelines are the ones by which your faculty colleagues will review your course proposal. These guidelines are an authoritative statement of the general principles of EWU GE. However this is also a living document, subject to periodic revision as GEC finds curricular issues that need to be refined.

  • All courses requesting General Education status are subject to review and approval by two faculty committees: CPAC and GEC.
  • Although a GE course may satisfy a minor or major requirement, first and foremost it needs to address the mission and General Education SLOs. In other words, GE courses must be accessible to any EWU student, regardless of their major.
  • To ensure the quality of the General Education program, we encourage faculty to reflect on best pedagogical practices to promote student learning.
  • Breadth Area courses must be 100-200 level.

Required Documentation

To be considered for inclusion in the General Education Program, the following documentation needs to be submitted:

  • Course Title and Number
  • Course Description (for catalog, includes overview of course plus the two GE SLOs).
  • Explanation/Justification of why this course belongs in the proposed area, with explicit reference to the breadth area’s criteria.
  • Identify the GE SLOs that this course will meet and explain the connection of each of these SLOs to your course content. How will the learning outcome be addressed? (i.e., specify how the course meets or is related to the relevant general education learning outcome.)
  • For each GE SLO, provide a “complex assignment” relevant to the proposed area that students in the course will complete toward learning that outcome. It is possible that a single complex assignment might be able to give instruction in more than one outcome. A complex assignment is a multi-stage assignment. It has multiple components that require the instructor to provide formative feedback throughout the assignment completion process.
  • Provide a rubric for the complex assignment that you will use to measure your students’ accomplishment of each SLO. You can use the sample rubric or adapt your own.

Student Learning Outcomes

All Breadth Area Courses must address two GE SLOs, as follows:

For more information, see Outcomes.

Group 1

  • Analytical Thinking
  • Critical and Creative Thinking
  • Information Literacy

Group 2

  • Written Communication
  • Quantitative Literacy

Course Preparation

In order to brainstorm and prepare submission material, faculty are encouraged to:

  • Attend workshops on Learning outcomes and assignment design to engage in a collaborative curriculum review and get feedback from colleagues.
  • Contact GE Outcome Faculty Fellows for assistance: Natalia Ruiz-Rubio (nruizrubio@ewu.edu) and Ann Le Bar (alebar@ewu.edu).

Worksheets