Curriculum to undergo reformation
Every semester at registration time, many students experience trouble getting into bottleneck courses, a problem Utah State University administration is trying to solve through curriculum reformation.
These classes are prerequisites to many others for a specific major and can postpone students’ progress in their programs.
Gary Straquadine, associate vice provost and professor of agricultural systems technology and education, said students sometimes spend more time than needed to graduate because of the lack of course sections offered.
Straquadine said he is studying last year’s registration numbers and analyzing which courses don’t offer enough openings for students. He said he plans to solve the shortage of classes by hiring new professors and/or instructors to teach additional course sections.
One of the changes that will be made will bring the evening and summer courses under the administration of the Provost Office instead of the Continuing Education Office, Straquadine said. The transition will be complete by Spring 2005, he said.
This change will make the courses flow better for students, he said, because they will be able to follow the natural order of their majors. The objective of this transition is to give students more possibilities to take essential classes to graduate, he said.
The courses that were offered through Continuing Education will be more organized, Straquadine said.
“We usually let the departments decide which courses they want to offer and those were normally the fun courses. Not many general education classes were offered nor bottleneck ones,” he said.
The university offers more than 4,000 courses, he said, but the curriculum management is only concerned with the ones students are having enrollment problems with.
During summer, for example, general education will be a priority, he said.
“We believe that a more robust summer schedule can help students move through their undergraduate curriculum more quickly. Summer also has the attraction of being charged at one rate – the in-state rate,” said Joyce Kinkead, vice provost for undergraduate students and research.
She also said one of the problems with students’ enrollment has already been solved.
“The writing classes were the number one bottleneck course and we took care of that. We hear from advisers and students that math/stat classes continue to be problematic,” she said.
Straquadine said the Continuing Education will still be responsible for all the workshops, conferences, seminars and less-than-one-week specialized courses. According to the Curriculum Management fact sheet, Continuing Education will serve non-traditional students such as part-time students, and will work under the orientation of the Center of Independent and Distance Learning at USU Brigham City.
Those courses will be offered via satellite, online and some also at the USU main campus.
He also said it is important for students to get into the classes they need, other wise they can get really frustrated and quit school.
“The more time you spend in school, the more likely you are to completely abandon it. If a student has to take a leave of absence because he couldn’t take the classes he needed, the probability of him not coming back is high,” he said.
Straquadine has been in the Associate Vice-Provost Office for four months but he has been teaching in the department of agriculture for 16 years. He said he is now planning the summer courses that will be offered in 2005.
-acantunes@cc.usu.edu