This article describes a general education course offering, Physics and the Arts. During the development of this course, physics and arts faculty collaborated closely. We cover the usual physics phenomena for such a course--light, color, and sound--in addition to gravity, equilibrium, and spacetime. Goals of the course are to increase students'…

An institution-wide focus on deep learning has made significant changes in the biology and physics core course curriculum at the U.S. Air Force Academy. The biology course director has reworked course objectives to reflect the learning-focused approach to teaching, while the physics curriculum has adopted new learning outcomes and ways to…

After describing our interdisciplinary humanities course and its history, we identify challenges these courses face and strategies for keeping them vigorous. We argue that course longevity depends on effective translation of vision and content into explicit goals bridging the gaps between faculty members and between faculty and students. (Contains…

The Information Systems (IS) curriculum needs to be updated frequently due to the rapid rate of advances in information systems (IS) and the technologies that drive IS, and also industry's skill requirement of IS graduates. This paper describes a Career Skills Oriented Approach to enhance the graduate IS curriculum based on current information…

Describes efforts to overcome fear and disinterest among science students in the College of General Studies, a two-year interdisciplinary core program at Boston University. Indicates that the textbook is used to support course lectures, rather than as a primary source; study habits are taught along with the subject material; and teamwork is…

End-of-course examinations are only as good as the assumptions used in designing them. What is a course's "essential" content? And what does it mean to master it? The end-of-course examinations developed by ACT are derived from assumptions that offer unique and challenging answers to these questions. This brief explains the process used to develop…

Designed for students, faculty, and others interested in the writing program at Umpqua Community College (UCC) in Oregon, this booklet clarifies the specific function and scope of the writing courses offered by UCC's Department of Humanities. Section I states the department's objectives (e.g., to provide a core curriculum meeting the requirements…

Extensive assessment of innovative core courses pointed to five features of the courses that led to students being actively engaged in learning. Faculty teaching the courses created an environment to foster collaborative learning, facilitated student ownership of learning, structured their courses to connect academic ideas with other disciplines…

The Department of Nursing of St. Anselm's College undertook a project designed to improve the curriculum and instructional design of the nursing program. The general objective was to develop and revise learning packages by providing supportive and technical assistance to the faculty. The following tasks were accomplished: development of learning…

As an aid for curriculum development officers at the California community colleges, this monograph presents course outlines for a model Administration of Justice curriculum. After introductory material describing the history of the curriculum development project that resulted in the creation of the model, the monograph presents descriptive…

Summarizes efforts to inculcate computer literacy in teachers in Macau (Portuguese territory down the coast from Hong Kong scheduled to return to Chinese sovereignty 12/20/99) to prepare for the information era. Topics include course objectives, core studies, optional studies, construction of Web-based learning environments, and multimedia…

During their first quarter, all nonremedial liberal arts students at LaGuardia Community College take an introductory cluster of four courses. These "freedom clusters" use a single body of material and a common analytical method and have, as their fixed elements, courses in philosophy, English composition, and the research paper. Course…

An integrated and multidisciplinary undergraduate core curriculum (COMCORE) was developed and implemented between 1992 and 1995 at the University of Massachusetts Lowell's College of Management. Traditional business core courses were replaced with a year-long integrated program, which simulated a new-product development process, and consisted of…

The paper discusses the choice of world history as a foundation course in the liberal arts college at Denison University, Ohio. It discusses why world history was chosen as a required course over the standard, introductory course, Western Civilization, compulsory in the 1960s. It also describes the kind and design of the world history course…