PSU’s General Education Program: Infographic
I officially started in my new position as General Education Coordinator last week, while I was away at the Digital Pedagogy Lab. But I have been informally working in the position for a few months. For example, back in May, I created the first draft of a new General Education Handbook which explains the underlying philosophy of our program as well as the details of the structural components. Getting new faculty, staff, and students to understand the program was my initial goal. I realized, however, that it is probably useful for the whole PSU community since we are making changes to the program as we implement the cluster initiative. It is a living document which I will keep up to date as we move forward with additional changes. For example, I have not included any information about our Gen Ed sunset renewal process because we have suspended it for the last few years. The Gen Ed Committee had a retreat on Monday of this week and we talked about restarting that process sometime in the next year. Once we do, I will add the information and forms required to renew the Gen Ed status of a course.
Because the Handbook contains a lot of information, I thought it would be helpful to distill the essential components of the program into an infographic so that people new to the program (including students) could get the basic idea of what it’s all about quickly. Here’s what I came up with. I’d love feedback about it!
(Edit: I incorporated Pat’s feedback from the comments.)
Article written by: Cathie
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I LOVE the idea of presenting the Gen Ed program in an infographic. This could be very helpful to students and faculty, and it shows at a glance that the Gen Ed program is not “complicated,” but actually pretty straightforward. Thank you for initiating this!
One suggestion is to make all the icons/shapes within each category the same size, as you have in the Directions category. In the First Year Experience section as currently shown, it looks like the Math Foundations component is more significant than Composition, and FYS the least significant of all. Making all of these icons the same size would convey that all are equally important components of the first year experience. The same goes for the Habits of Mind and the Connections.
It would be interesting to get some feedback from students about how they interpret this–especially new students who have very little familiarity with the Gen Ed program.
Thanks, Pat! Great point about the size of the boxes. I’ll see what I can do. And yes, I plan to share this with FYS instructors to use in their classes. I will be sure to ask them to get feedback from students about it.