Installation Plan

Core Education Continuing Installation Plan

Approved by the Core Education Committee, June 11, 2025; Reviewed by the Faculty Senate Executive Committee

The Core Education Curriculum is now fully provisioned and actively enrolling students. This document outlines a continuing installation plan for academic years 2025-2027.

General education programs are intended to give college students broad exposure to foundational knowledge and skills. The goal is to build critical skills in students, expose students to new domains of knowledge they have not yet been exposed to, model the habits of mind of scholars from a wide range of disciplines, and develop engaged citizens in a strong democratic society.

Principles of Core Education at OSU:

1. Core Education courses should be of broad interest and important to a wide range of OSU students. 
2. Courses approved for Core Ed must have as their primary purpose Core Ed, and each Core Ed learning outcome must be integral to the course and meaningfully assessed.
3. Students who transfer into OSU from Oregon community colleges with the Core Transfer Map (or equivalent block of transfer credits) should have learning opportunities equitable to those experienced by students who start at OSU as freshmen.
4. Core Education courses should be proposed and taught by faculty with appropriate expertise in the topic covered by the course.
5. The number of course options within each category may and should vary, but a goal of Core Ed is to avoid an overabundance of different course offerings in any one category to avoid substantial redundancy between courses, undersubscribed courses, and a bloated Core that is difficult to meaningfully assess.

Practices to Maintain Principles:

1. Category Reviews and Decertification: Evaluate enrollments in Core Ed Foundational Core and Seeking Solutions courses to ensure courses serve students broadly (i.e., are not relevant to only a few majors) and to remove barriers for students who transition between programs and institutions. The Core Ed Director will pull term-by-term enrollment data (on courses that have been offered at least three times) and provide it to the Core Ed Committee, who will make decisions regarding whether the course is serving the Core Education mission. Courses that are deemed to be serving primarily a narrow number of majors may be decertified from Core Ed. As a rough guideline, if a course enrolls more than 50% of enrollment in two or fewer majors averaged across three terms, the course may be decertified, although extenuating circumstances will be considered by the committee. Courses will not be decertified if decertification will negatively impact the Cascades campus or internal transfer students.
2. SOI Process for Additional Proposals: The Core is fully provisioned as of summer 2025. During the years of 2025-27, changes to the Core will be kept to a minimum to allow for data collection, assessment, and evaluation before making any substantial changes.
   • If a course was previously approved through the SOI in academic years 23-25, that course will still be reviewed in AY 25-26 for the category it was submitted for. As long as the course remains in the category it was submitted for on the original SOI, the details of the course may be revised before submitting.
   • If a program, via the Core Education College Designee, would like to submit additional courses beyond what was previously approved on an SOI into a Core Ed category during the 2025-27 years, they must follow these steps:
     • Submit a Statement of Intent (SOI) via the College Designee to the Core Education Committee that shows how the course fills a gap in the intended Core category.
     • The SOI must include the proposed course description, justification for a new course in the Core, and the gap it fills in the intended category (including any similar courses already in the category):
       1. To determine if a proposed course fills a content gap in the intended Core Ed category’s domain, programs can find all Core Ed courses within a given category in the Catalog.
       2. Details about each current course’s learning outcomes, course content, learning material, and more can be found in the CIM system.
       3. Peer reviewed literature can also be used to identify novel and emerging needs that current offerings do not address.
       4. New or change course proposals could fill a gap by adding new methodologies, disciplinary identities, or topical areas of study to the category.
       5. Units should describe their programmatic expertise relevant to the new offering  (LOCR, page #2).  Supporting documentation is optional.
     • The Core Education Committee will decide whether or not the program will be invited to submit the course for the Core Ed curriculum based on the details provided in the SOI and the principles and practices described above (see the rubric).

3. Communication Plan: These guidelines will be published on the Core Ed website, shared through the College Designee meetings, and sent out through the Core Ed digest and newsletter emails. This follows the same modes of communication used for the first implementation plan.