Faculty, administrators review undergrad education at retreat

While students took time off during Fall Break, over 100 faculty members and administrators met at Callaway Gardens for a weekend retreat to review Tech's undergraduate curriculum and interdisciplinarity. The retreat was hosted by Provost Gary Schuster's Task Force for Excellence, which was formed last May to review Tech's undergraduate and graduate education.

Ray Vito, Tech's first vice provost of graduate and undergraduate education, leads one of the subcommittees of the task force.

"I have been at Georgia Tech for 34 years, and this is the first time that the Provost has taken the initiative to look at undergraduate education as well as graduate study and research in detail. But the undergraduate focus is pretty unique and forces us to ask a really hard question: are we educating our students to be as successful as previous generations of Tech students?" Vito said.

Anu Parvatiyar, undergraduate student body president, was one of three students invited to attend the retreat. According to Parvatiyar, the Provost's Task Force marks the first time since the 1995 semester conversion decision that Tech has taken a comprehensive look at undergraduate curriculum.

At the retreat, a number of ideas were discussed, including adopting the College of Computing's Threads curriculum Institute-wide, the formation of "mini-minor" programs, thematic academic years, academic calendar restructuring and a greater emphasis on experiential learning.

"Those were all ideas that were discussed and they all had some interest, although where they'll go, it really kind of depends," Vito said.

Mini-minors would require fewer required hours than regular minors but would differ from certificate programs in that they would probably appear on transcripts and would offer more variety to students.

Another idea involved setting a theme to each academic year. Each "year of engagement" would challenge faculty and students to incorporate the theme into their work and would bring speakers, events and special courses to campus.

"It's a very interesting idea as a way to possibly get students and faculty more engaged with each other and perhaps to get us more into a thinking, intellectual mode ... but it's going to take the engagement of the students to make it happen," Vito said.

The Provost's Task Force has two themes. The first one is defining undergraduate technological education for the 21st century. The second theme centers on defining and supporting interdisciplinarity, specifically in graduate study and research.

Both groups met over the summer and defined specific topics on which the Fall Break retreat was based.

"My hope is that as we go along we can expand the number of students in this group," Parvatiyar said.

Vito believes student participation will increase over time. "There will probably be more students as we wind down. We are nowhere near closure on this thing. It's very important in all of this that students be engaged. There is no question of it, and I don't think anyone was purposely trying to eliminate students. Whenever the final report is written, students will have plenty of chance for input," Vito said.

The task force will continue meeting over the next several months and is slated to make its final recommendations to the Provost sometime in the spring.