UW-Oshkosh’s Liberal Education Reform Team, LERT, is in the process of bringing big changes to the way that liberal arts classes are presented and organized.
According to Oshkosh’s LERT Web site, “The Liberal Education Reform Team is charged with presenting a framework for student learning outcomes to be adopted by the UW-Oshkosh. The following outcomes, based on those from the American Association of Colleges & Universities, are being proposed for campus-wide discussion and adoption.”
The point of LERT is to bring more organization to the way that classes are taught to students. Once the initiative is complete, each class will have listed outcomes and clear skills that students will gain by the time the class is over.
Oshkosh professor of English, Susan Nuernberg said that, through the initiative, teachers will get together and take a serious look at their classes.
“Some of the council members (of LERT) will probably go and visit each department and sit down with them saying, ‘OK, here are all of your courses, and here are all of the learning outcomes.’” Nuernberg said. “The courses will all have definitions then. There will be short definitions for each of the learning outcomes. So, the department members can get together and say ‘well, in my course, I emphasize these things and it has this outcome.”’
One of the main goals of LERT is to create essential learning outcomes that can be used as guidelines for each class. LERT’s Executive Committee Chairman, Mike Eierman, said that the point of these outcomes is to ensure that all students have developed certain skills and knowledge by the time that they graduate from Oshkosh.
“LERT’s responsibility is to help the faculty establish policy and procedure to ensure that all students graduating from UW-O have both the opportunity to achieve, and are achieving, a certain level of ability with respect to these learning outcomes,” Eierman said.
Eierman said that by analyzing current learning outcomes and adjusting curriculum, departments will have more consistency. This will eventually make things easier for students.
According to Nuernberg, it is very important to have consistency among classes that have many different sections, as well.
“Any department that offers a lot of sections of one course, like speech (Communications 111) or WBIS, will have to have some conversation among the instructors to agree that those courses are going to emphasize the same things at the same levels,” Nuernberg said.
Nuernberg said that this is why having LERT is necessary. She thinks there needs to be a more formal system when it comes to the way classes are identified and assessed. This way, students will come out of a semester with the skills they thought they would gain when they went into the course.
“How do we know that you are teaching what the students thought the class was going to entail when they enrolled? How do we assess that?” Nuernberg said. “Right now, it’s hard to do it the way that things are set up. With the new program it will be much easier, and we will be able to start making changes based on that feedback.”
LERT has mapped out a list of different knowledge, skill and responsibility categories that each class will fit into. The classes will also be arranged into difficulty levels: beginning, developing and proficient.
Examples of skills that will be included are critical thinking, creative thinking, communication, teamwork, leadership skills and problem solving.
“They (students) will be able to see which classes offer what and take a class that has the proper objectives, giving them the experience that they feel they need,” Nuernberg said.
Although LERT does have a timeline to map out when these changes will happen, students probably won’t see too many changes in the near future, according to Eierman.
“In the short-run, faculty and students will see little change,” Eierman said. “In the long-run they may see significant change to curriculum requirements.”
He also said the eventual impact and change will be determined by the faculty and the faculty’s governance groups once they are presented with LERT’s findings.
Nuernberg said that although the process is a long one (full implementation won’t happen until 2013), the outcome is expected to better organize liberal arts classes for all students at Oshkosh.
