General Education recertification process

NOTE: For proposing both new and existing courses for general education certification and to access additional resources including sample course proposals, refer to General Education proposals.

The General Education Board (GEB) is charged by the University Senate to periodically review general education courses. Reviews of certified courses take place every 10 years. The GEB evaluates each course based on criteria developed by the Senate in 1989 and revised in 2016. The policies and guidelines used by the GEB are available on the Office of the Provost's General Education Course Policies and Guidelines website. Of these policies and guidelines, the following three will be most helpful in recertification of your general education course:

Additionally, the College of LAS and Campus GEB Proposal for General Education Certification form provides excellent information on how to best address the general education and general information questions posed in CIM.

The course recertification process takes place in the CIM (Course Inventory Management) system, which is used for all course revisions and actions. Your unit’s authorized CIM user would have received an email from “CourseLeaf Editor” informing them that your course is up for recertification. If you are the authorized CIM user, you will be provided with further instructions on how to complete the recertification process. If you are not an authorized CIM user, you can ask that your authorized user print off the General Education questions for you and when completed, they can enter your responses into CIM. Alternatively, you can answer the general information and general education category-specific questions in the College of LAS and Campus GEB Proposal for General Education Certification form and pass that along to your unit’s authorized CIM user for entry into CIM. It is best that the instructor for the course being recertified or those most familiar with the course answer the recertification questions.

If you do not want to pursue recertification of your course as a gen ed, simply state such in the “Justification for change” section of CIM and provide a brief statement why.

If you do wish to pursue recertification of the course as a gen ed, respond comprehensively to both the General Information questions and the category-specific questions in the General Education section of the course CIM. You will find the additional information presented in the College of LAS and Campus GEB Proposal for General Education Certification form helpful in answering the general information questions (particularly, how the course fulfills the overall objectives of general education). Also, following the information provided by the Guidelines for General Education Courses, Campus Requirements for General Education Syllabi, and GEB Course Feedback Forms will ensure that your submission meets all requirements for recertification. Be sure to attach one syllabus from a past recent term in which the course was taught and one syllabus meant for the next term in which the course will be taught, the latter following the Campus Requirements for General Education Syllabi. Samples of assignments, quizzes, or exams that help demonstrate how the course meets the category guidelines may also be included, although in most instances these are not necessary.

Primary reasons for rollbacks and rejections from the GEB include the lack of discussion of scholarship on women and gender issues, lack of evidence in the syllabus, and inappropriate staffing ratios. For suggestions on how perspectives of women and gender can be incorporated into courses having different gen ed categories and examples of successful CIM proposals for all categories, refer to examples of course proposals under Resources on the General Education proposals page.

Once the completed proposal is submitted, it will move through the full workflow in the CIM system. If you have questions prior to submission or at anytime during the recertification process, please contact Stephen R. Downie.

Thank you for recertifying your course for general education and ensuring that it is of the highest quality for our students!