Make plans to attend a Lunch and Learn hosted by the William G. Jackson Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) and Essential Education at Michigan Tech.
The Lunch and Learn is titled “Building an Essential Ed Experience: (Re)Designing Your Course to Become an E3.”
When: Tuesday, March 4, from 12-1 p.m.
Where: MUB Ballroom A
Registration: Register to Attend the Lunch and Learn (registration is required).
Interested in designing and teaching an Essential Education Experience (E3)? Join E3 leadership and fellow instructors for a course redesign workshop. E3 courses should prepare students for an ever-changing, dynamic and diverse world by increasing social awareness, global understandings and/or cultural competencies through hands-on learning. Students will apply their learning toward a project or activity that engages with community beyond the traditional classroom.
This workshop will cover the basics of E3 requirements and provide participants time to workshop with others an existing or proposed Essential Education Experience course, while learning more about practical tools for transforming their own courses into E3s. Faculty who are interested in E3 courses but don’t have a specific course in mind yet are welcome to attend and can expect to gain insights that will aid in future course development.
Lunch will be provided to those who register.
For questions or to request accommodations, including dietary, please feel free to contact the CTL at ctl@mtu.edu or 906-487-3000.
The newly established Essential Education Employment Task Force, composed of organizations that have been long-standing recruiters at Michigan Tech, recently held its first meeting. Many of these recruiters are Michigan Tech alumni, united by a shared passion for helping shape programming that equips our students for success—not only in their first jobs post-graduation but throughout their entire careers.
This task force will play a critical role in ensuring that we clearly communicate the value, accomplishments, and learning outcomes tied to Essential Education. Their input will help us continue developing programs that foster the Essential Abilities our students need to thrive in today’s workforce.
We would like to extend our thanks to the Essential Education Employer Task Force members for collaborating with our faculty and staff to refine and strengthen the components of Michigan Tech’s Essential Education initiative. The task force includes representatives from Stellantis, Gerdau, Michigan Scientific, Kimberly-Clark, Greenheck, Nexteer, Caterpillar, Plexus, General Motors, and Security Vitals.
The task force’s mission is to help us establish effective communication channels with recruiting organizations, ensuring they understand the Essential Abilities our students are developing through these experiences. As the task force continues its work, we will focus on building engaging learning opportunities that align with the skills and attributes these employers seek in their future employees.
What are the Essential Abilities developed throughout the Essential Education programming?
Michigan Tech’s current General Education program has 8 undergraduate student learning goals, of which 6 are used in the assessment of General Education. These 6 USLGs include 41 performance criteria. Our new Essential Education program reduces these to 4 undergraduate student learning goals with 12 performance criteria that we call Essential Abilities. This reduction aligns us with the number of learning goals and performance criteria at peer institutions and simplifies assessment within essential education. Below are the 4 learning goals and associated Essential Abilities defined.
Learning Goal: Think Critically
Question Assumptions: Students identify and evaluate stated and unstated assumptions underlying an experience, question, problem, or statement.
Evaluate Information: Students identify and evaluate relevant information to address an experience, question, problem, or statement.
Analyze Ethical Implications: Students recognize and analyze ethical, questions, and problems.
Learning Goal: Communicate
Communicate Quantitatively: Students interpret quantitative data and choose appropriate methods and formulas to communicate findings.
Communicate Contextually: Students choose communication formats and methods appropriate for the context, purpose and audience.
Foster Collaboration: Students communicate with others to develop, distribute, and complete tasks; seek and incorporate the perspectives of others; and communicate main ideas and results in team settings.
Learning Goal: Adapt
Reflect: students review prior learning (and experiences) to consider significance of experiences inside and outside the classroom as well as plan next steps for learning and growth.
Welcome Challenge: students demonstrate willingness to try new things, persevere in the face of obstacles, learn from mistakes, and appreciate learning and growth in addition to achievement.
Explore Diverse Perspectives: students demonstrate awareness of their own norms and biases as well as existing diversity within and beyond their own social and cultural group(s).
Learning Goal: Contribute/Transform
Engage in Civic Life: students develop the knowledge, skills, and motivation to make a difference in the civic life of their communities.
Innovate Solutions: students apply an appropriate process to design, evaluate, and/or implement a strategy to answer an open-ended question or achieve a desired goal.
Create: students compose novel (or unique variations of existing) works, ideas, questions, formats, or products and synthesize their ideas with those of others.
So why make the change to these four goals and their aligned essential abilities?
The shift to the Essential Abilities in Michigan Tech’s new Essential Education program was driven by the need for a more streamlined, impactful approach to student learning. This move allows us to focus more effectively on the skills and competencies that matter most to employers and help students thrive not only in their first jobs but throughout their careers. The Essential Abilities emphasize critical thinking, communication, global awareness, and lifelong learning—key competencies for navigating an increasingly complex and interconnected world.
Think Critically
The ability to think critically about complex issues is vital for all students. While the disciplinary context and subject matter will vary, the ability to carefully consider assumptions, available information, and the ethical dimensions of problems and proposed solutions are key skills. Collectively, these skills help students make sense of large amounts of information, detect and avoid fallacies, facilitate dialogue, attend to diverse perspectives, and cultivate a deeper awareness of how to connect and synthesize culture, social, economic, and scientific ideas.
Communicate
The challenges of the 21st Century require the ability to communicate information and ideas intentionally, strategically, and responsibly – across a range of audiences, disciplines, and media – using a variety of modes (written, spoken, quantitative). Such communication required attention to the diversity of contexts (global, local, intercultural). Skillfulness in this area involves the ability to connect with others through interpersonal and group communication skills.
Adapt
Working and living in a diverse and rapidly changing technological society requires skills and mindsets that support lifelong learning, personal and professional growth, agility, and resilience. It is important that students are able and willing to take appropriate personal and intellectual risks, reflect on their own performance (successes and failures), and consider diverse perspectives that may evolve over time.
Contribute/Transform
A new frontier is emerging where the solutions to social problems will be found in a rapidly changing world where science, technology, humanities, arts, and social sciences intersect. In this environment, those who seek to make significant contributions to society must engage with multiple perspectives and use well-developed creative thinking skills to form new ideas that form their actions. It is essential for students to develop, share, and inspire creativity – such as pursuing opportunities in the creative arts, collaborating to find innovative and ethical solutions, and contributing to their communities and the broader world.
Michigan Technological University’s Essential Education Initiative will be fully implemented in Fall 2025. This forward-thinking curriculum will prepare our students for careers that don’t exist today. Michigan Tech’s Essential Ed further aligns our undergraduate curriculum with business workforce needs, further enhancing career opportunities for our students.
Welcome to the first installment of the Husky Folio blog. In the coming months, we’ll explore Michigan Tech’s new Husky Folio program, which builds and enhances metacognition using ePortfolios to inquire about, reflect upon, and integrate knowledge. At its foundation is the concept of folio thinking.
Folio thinking encourages deeper thinking, self-assessment, and growth by maintaining a personal collection of work, ideas, and reflections. This approach helps students track their progress, identify areas for improvement, and develop a habit of continual self-improvement. It fosters a deeper understanding of key concepts, encourages individuals to connect their learning to real-world applications, and empowers them to actively participate in their intellectual development.
You may have heard the term folio thinking used in the last few years as a diverse team of Michigan Tech faculty and staff worked to infuse the curriculum with more opportunities for reflection. This team studied modern learning theory and best practices in helping students succeed in and out of the classroom. One “high-impact practice” recognized by the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) is the use of ePortfolios to “[make] meaning through reflection and thereby [develop] deeper, more intentional identities as learners.”1 Folio thinking is the process of collecting, organizing, reflecting on, and drawing connections between learning experiences. The ePortfolio is a student’s electronic home for this work, their Husky Folio.
Suppose you have a LinkedIn profile and are active on the platform. In that case, you’ve already engaged in a simple form of folio thinking by curating the information you feel best reflects your professional identity. Husky Folio is a more structured yet flexible way of collecting learning experiences and reflective activities and integrating them into portfolios. Depending on the need, students can turn those artifacts into portfolios demonstrating learning to faculty, recruiters, admissions officers for graduate school, or friends and family.
Starting this semester, students taking one of the First-Year Seminar courses will gain experience using the ePortfolio platform PebblePad. Students will have the opportunity to consider where they would rate themselves on the new Essential Abilities and reflect on an experience or concept such as academic planning. They will also create an “About Me” ePortfolio.
Incorporating folio thinking into existing coursework can be as simple as taking a few minutes at the end of class to share their thoughts on how the course material relates to their personal experiences, career goals, or societal issues. For example, “How do you think the concepts we’ve covered so far relate to your future career in [specific field]?” or “Discuss how the material we’ve studied impacts society. What role do you see yourself playing in addressing these issues?” You can also provide more formal opportunities, such as having each student in a group project write an individual reflection on the group dynamics, their contribution, and what they learned from the collaborative process. You can find more examples of ways to incorporate folio thinking into various courses by reviewing the resource document below and learn more about the value of learning portfolios from this helpful video.
In the next installment of the Husky Folio blog, we’ll discuss the tool PebblePad and begin to explore creative applications in each unique course and degree. In the meantime, if you want to know more, visit the William G. Jackson Center for Teaching and Learning Open House on Thursday, September 5, between 1 and 2:30 p.m. and see our table! You can also attend a Lunch ‘n Learn on October 22 and learn more about how faculty are employing folio thinking pedagogy in their courses this semester. You can also email Dr. Nancy Barr at nbbarr@mtu.edu to discuss how a Husky Folio could creatively support your course needs.
1 Eynon, B., & Gambino, L. M. (2017). Introduction. In High-Impact ePortfolio Practice: A Catalyst for Student, Faculty, and Institutional Learning (p. 1). Stylus.
Written by: Nancy Barr, PhD, NREMT, Assessment and Writing Support Specialist, Office of the Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education
The Essential Ed Leadership Team is setting up weekly “Office Hours” to support our campus community as we implement the new Essential Education curriculum. Individuals, department committees, and other working groups are welcome to attend for consultations, including (but not limited to) the following topics:
- Revising degree audits and flowcharts to make the most of Essential Ed requirements
- Tips for Building an Essential Ed Minor
- How to Build an Essential Education Experience Course
- What are in Essential Ed Seminar Modules
- How is Essential Education Assessed
- How have Wellbeing and Success Courses changed
- What is Folio Thinking, and how do ePortfolios support Folio Thinking
The first two Essential Ed Office Hours will be in Library Conference Room 103 from 12:00 – 1:00 pm on Wednesday, September 4, and Thursday, September 12. The complete calendar of Office Hour Dates for the Fall Semester can be found below. Note the Special Guests and Topics noted on the calendar. For further information or questions, contact Steve Patchin – Project Manager for Essential Ed Implementation, at shpatchi@mtu.edu.
| Date | Day | Special Guest & Topic |
| September 4 | Wednesday | |
| September 12 | Thursday | |
| September 18 | Wednesday | |
| September 26 | Thursday | Nancy Barr – Folio Thinking & PebblePad |
| October 2 | Wednesday | Jeannie DeClerck – Assessment & Essentail Ed |
| October 10 | Thursday | |
| October 16 | Wednesday | |
| October 24 | Thursday | |
| October 30 | Wednesday | |
| November 7 | Thursday | |
| November 13 | Wednesday | Jeannie DeClerck – Assessment & Essential Ed |
| November 21 | Thursday | Nancy Barr – Folio Thinking & PebblePad |
| November 27 | Wednesday | |
| December 5 | Thursday | |
| December 11 | Wednesday |
Michigan Tech Essential Education will be soft-launching the Michigan Tech Seminar shared modules beginning this Fall, 2024. These modules are embedded in Intro to the Major seminars or included in existing large-format courses (ENG 1101). Several units are in the process of developing new courses that will use the shared modules and fulfill the seminar requirement. Those majors not offering their own seminar course will have their students take a university-wide seminar beginning in Fall 2025.
Required assignments are expected to require no more than ⅓ of a 1 credit course, with expectations of about 15 hours total of combined in and out of class work. Eight of the nine modules in the list below are now available in Canvas Commons for seminar instructors to access and use. We anticipate that the remaining module will be available in Commons by September 6. Anyone from Michigan Tech can view the modules, but we ask that only Michigan Tech Seminar courses use them with students (to avoid unnecessary repetition of materials).
Modules include:
- Welcome to College — Reviews key policies and resources and helps students understand the differences between high school and college.
- Husky Points — Students select activities to help them connect to the community, University, and resources.
- Career Preparation — Students create an About Me page in the PebblePad ePortfolio platform and draft a resume (optional).
- Time Management — Students track their time use and discuss strategies for time management.
- Academic Planning — Students explore personal and academic goals and make a four-year plan.
- Stress Management — Students learn how stress impacts them physically and mentally and explore strategies and resources for managing stress.
- Loneliness — Students learn to recognize signs of loneliness (in themselves and others) and develop strategies for managing feelings of disconnection and accessing resources.
- Reflection — Students learn more about how reflection supports learning and personal growth and receive instruction and feedback in effective reflective writing.
- Introduction to the Essential Abilities — Students use a structured PebblePad workbook to reflect on the Essential Abilities and identify their own strengths and opportunities for growth.
A special thanks to those instructors who participated in the Seminar Training, which took place on Thursday, August 15. We appreciate the efforts of the summer team that constructed the content and Canvas Modules:
- AJ Hamlin – Engineering Fundamentals
- Maria Bergstrom – Humanities/CSA
- Linda Wanless – Center for Teaching and Learning
- Anna McClatchy – Wahtera Center for Student Success
- Dawn Corwin – Wahtera Center for Student Success
- Nancy Barr – Assessment and Writing Support Specialist/APUE
- Heather Simpson – Exploring Majors/CSA
- Susan Liebau – Chemistry
- Jenn Sams – Library
- Kailee Laplander – Electrical and Computer Engineering
Below is the list of courses that will be launching the Essential Education Seminar components, including new Canvas Modules and associated activities in the Fall of 2024
Participating in Soft Launch Fall 2024
(57 sections, 1125 students)
BL 1580 First Year Exp in Bio Sci
BL 1590 First year exp in pre-health
BL 1600 First Year Exp in Med Lab Sci
CH 1130 PDC1 (prof dev chem)
CS 1000 Explorations in Computing
ENG1101 Engineering Problem Solving and Analysis
HF 1999 Intro to the HF major
HU 1000 Intro to Humanities
KIP 1000 Intro to Exercise Sci
KIP 1010 Intro to Sports and Fit Mgmt
MA 1910 Exploring Symmetry Groups
PSY 1999 Intro to the Psych major
SA1000 – Exploring Majors
SS 1001 Orientation to Soc Sci
Courses in development for Fall of 2025
Nursing
Physics
VPA – Sound Design, Theatre
University-Wide Course
College of Computing
Forestry
Questions? Contact the Essential Education Implementation Leadership Team: essential-ed-l@mtu.edu or reach out to Steve Patchin: shpatchi@mtu.edu
Michigan Tech’s Essential Education initiative was developed to prepare students to be leaders in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Essential Education signals that the skills, abilities, and mindsets facilitated by a broad education in the foundational disciplinary areas of the sciences, math, social sciences, arts, and humanities are essential to students’ educational and professional development. This forward-thinking curriculum prepares students for careers students for careers that don’t exist today.
Michigan Tech’s Essential Education website has just gone live. You can visit the new website here: https://www.mtu.edu/essential-ed/. This public-facing site provides more information on the why and how of Michigan Tech’s Essential Education program, which formally launches in the Fall of 2025 for our first-year students and scales to capacity by the 2027-28 academic year.
Special thanks to Michigan Tech’s University Marketing and Communications team, as well as Michigan Tech’s Essential Education Marketing and Communication Advisory Board, and the Essential Education Implementation Leadership Team for their work on constructing this website.
As our cross-campus academic teams continue to build new academic courses and minors for Michigan Tech’s Essential Education Tech Forward Initiative, we would like to remind you of some dates in 2024 associated with the “White Binder” process.
- Friday, October 18, 2024 – All changes and proposals approved by chairs are forwarded to the Deans for review and approval.
- Friday, October 18, 2024 – All proposals for Essential Education due to the Essential Education Council
- Friday, December 6 – Essential Education notifies Registrar’s Office of approved Essential Education Courses
- Friday, December 20 – Degree Audit updates due to the Registrars office
Note: More information will be coming as the Essential Education Council is created in the next 3 months.
A signature component of Michigan Tech’s new Essential Education Program will be the Essential Education Experience. These experiences are meant to help prepare our students for an ever-changing, dynamic, and diverse world. This active, hands-on experience is expected to expand interaction with the greater society (beyond self) and allow for connections among general education courses.
Civic Engagement is defined as experiences where students identify issues of public concern, seeking to understand patterns, outcomes of actions, and/or complexity. There experiences will increase their social awareness, global understandings, or cultural competencies through experiential learning. The first RFP’s have been awarded to develop these new Essential Education Experience (E3) courses. They are listed with title and description, with links to broader descriptions in the Michigan Tech Essential Education Blog. The Essential Education Leadership Team is grateful for our innovative academic teams in leading the development of these signature courses.
“Reading the Forest” as an Essential Education Experience Course by Tara Bal (CFRES)
Reading the Forest is an international ecologically-focused travel course emphasizing observational learning. Students study forest ecology topics and various natural disturbance and human-derived impacts that shape the forests around us. Connecting to the natural world and place-based learning influences the way we make observations and think deeper about how the past and current activities make the forested landscapes around us. To discern the story of a forested landscape, it is similar to learning forensics, clues we can use to “read” the landscape and recognize evidence. Students will explore multiple forest types, museums, nature festivals, and reflect on cultural values of northern forests with guided writing. This course will be offered as a part of a faculty-led Sweden Study Abroad program. This will be an immersive program based in the Swedish forest, consisting of 3 classes taught by 3 faculty. Overall in the program, students will investigate environmental and social issues; study ecological thinking, environmental art, and community engagement, and learn from local/global eco-community projects. Through different lenses, each course will incorporate the theme of the interdependency between humans and the natural world, to address issues of sustainability, resilience, and community engagement, and to provide in-depth interdisciplinary field experience.
Exploring Language Acquisition and Language Teaching by Estela Mira Barreda (HU)
Exploring Language Acquisition and Language Teaching is a course designed to engage students in real world experiences of acquiring and teaching a second language. Throughout the course, students will learn about communicative approaches to language acquisition and teaching. This experiential course will provide novel pedagogical opportunities by emphasizing the application of their knowledge in real world classroom settings – learning, reflecting, and engaging through teaching. The core of the class focuses on the hands-on experience of guiding middle school students through the exploration of basic Spanish in a student-centered environment. Through this immersive teaching opportunity, MTU students will apply communicative approaches to facilitating the acquisition of a second language. Teaching in middle school will provide them with a real-world context to practice the language acquired in class by considering audience, context, and content. Importantly, applying their learning to teaching will also provide an experience that challenges the limits of turning theory into practice, which we will explore together through critical reflection activities. By applying the theoretical knowledge they gain about the communicative approach to teaching in a middle school classroom, students will be prompted to interrogate their assumptions, biases, and ideas about how to effectively teach a second language.
Community and Social Problems Essential Education Experience by Susanna Peters (SS)
This course offers students the opportunity to take on a team project in partnership with a non-profit, civic or social change organization to comprehend and tackle a challenge that group is facing. Faculty will be the liaison with the organization to ensure there is a meaningful/impactful project for students. The experience is envisioned to be flexible enough to embrace work done by a broad range of NGOs and local or state organizations. Examples include: legal services for a state sponsored non-profit, development of educational materials focused on the elderly and other victims of predatory online/phone based scams, researching and drafting a plan to find affordable local housing for clients of a non-profit running domestic violence shelter, and grant writing and outreach for nature conservancies and land trusts, grant writing and community surveying for arts organizations, and assistance for local courts to communicate the availability of its online help site. Overall, the projects will change, but all will ensure students develop practical skills and community knowledge. In addition, the course will focus on understanding the mission, revenue generation, communication strategies, and service challenges facing these organizations through in-class speakers and on-site field trips.
History of Hockey Essential Education Experience by Mark Rouleau (SS) and Laura Rouleau (SS)
The History of Hockey Essential Education Experience course will cover US-Canada relations and their history through the lens of the sport of ice hockey. The course will be interdisciplinary, with an emphasis on teaching students how to integrate the analytical and methodological techniques of history, comparative politics, and international relations. Students will apply these techniques to develop the culminating assignment of the course through archival research, local community engagement, and case study research methods to produce a documentary or written report outlining their research findings. The course will be taught primarily in-person and on-campus but will have a one-week intensive study away component where students will visit historic sites and conduct archival research. Experiential learning activities will include visits to the local “birthplace of hockey” sites, the MTU archives, the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto, and the competing “birthplace of hockey” sites in Montreal. The course will begin in-person in a traditional semester format and then progressively transition into an intensive study away to Canada during Thanksgiving Break or Spring Break. This study-away experience will be designed to leverage the pre-established motivation of students who would be more willing to learn essential education content that aligns with a topic they are already intellectually curious about.
Community Archaeology of Energy by Timothy Scarlett (SS)
This E3 course will build upon experience with students in the PUSH research project, who engage with planning for the adaptive reuse of abandoned mines in post-mining communities. Students in the course will work with municipal leaders or heritage organizations, helping residents studying the local development and evolution of energy infrastructure, in support of their community’s efforts to imagine more just, sustainable, and equitable possible futures through the energy transition. Working with local residents (initially from post-mining communities), students will use archaeological and historical methods to study the origins and evolution of energy infrastructure, marrying archival, historical, and oral-historical research with field surveys of material culture and landscape remains. They will map the differential legacies of costs and benefits of energy production, transmission, and consumption This course could be paired with an Enterprise Team or a Senior Design project that also supports community collaboration, where those are more focused on designing future infrastructure. Students could enroll in both classes, allowing them to study the energy past and the energy future of a community. This class could be expanded to consider other types of planning needs for communities considering how post-industrial sites or landscapes (brownfields) can be repurposed to provide energy services as part of the energy transition.
Guided Learning for Digital Newcomers by Kay Tislar (CLS) and Charles Wallace (CS)
Since 2011, the Breaking Digital Barriers group has offered one-on-one tutoring in digital
competencies to our local community, through the BASIC (Building Adult Skills in Computing)
program. They have learned that an effective learning program for digital competencies cannot simply focus on rote, step-by-step instruction. Interface designs change; operating systems are updated and upgraded; apps and services come and go. Accordingly, this program seeks a deeper type of learning for our digital newcomers. The BASIC program focuses on the higher order skills that are essential for keeping up with the rapid pace of technological change and transferring knowledge from task to task or system to system. This experiential learning course will raise student awareness of the challenges facing digital newcomers, and it will empower them to assist newcomers through the BASIC program. The course will include a discussion-based lecture section, covering topics in gerontechnology and learning theory, and a practicum section, where students will work with digital newcomers in the local community, using the BASIC process to guide them to greater competence and confidence. The practicum section will include a reflection session, where students will share their tutoring experiences and use them to refine their own personal tutoring strategies.
Public Policy Lab at Michigan Tech by Adam Wellstead (SS)
Worldwide, there has been the proliferation of policy innovation labs (PILs), which serve as an organizational setting where searches for policy solutions are developed within scientific laboratory‐like structures. PILs provide physical spaces for creative interaction and knowledge exchange to improve public services through innovative tools and design solutions to policy issues. Central to PILs is stakeholder engagement in the co-design or co-production of policies. An increasing number of PLIs are housed in non-profit organizations and universities. The “Public Policy Lab at Michigan Tech” Essential Education Experience course will be a “learning lab” that involves high student and stakeholder engagement. The “Public Policy Lab at Michigan Tech” course will promote immersive project-based and experiential learning. In doing so, it will address problem-solving by relying on design-thinking methods; applying experimental approaches and scientific methodologies (quantitative and qualitative) to test and measure the effectiveness of public policies and programs; and adopting a user-centered approach that recognizes the expertise of stakeholders, incorporates key actors, and encourages target populations to participate in processes. The class will function as a PIL addressing a tangible policy issue. Over its duration, the instructor will take on the role of lab director and the students as lab team members.
The Documentary Experience by Erin Smith (HU)
This essential experience course will provide students with the opportunity to learn about and experience the complexities of telling “true” stories through a combination of study, practice, critical reflection, and participation in the annual 41 North Film Festival (41northfilmfest.org). Over the past nine years, the festival has brought over 200 contemporary films (primarily documentary) to Michigan Tech, as well as notable guests. Schools and departments that have participated over the years include biology, chemistry, chemical engineering, the college of computing, FRES, social sciences, the health research institute, mathematics, geology, humanities, physics, visual and performing arts, and the Great Lakes Research Center and the Health Research Institute, as well as Michigan Tech staff and others working with Michigan Tech in various capacities from industry to public agencies.
Students will spend the first nine weeks learning about approaches to documentary storytelling, while creating micro-documentary projects that explore communities and places on campus that are both familiar and unfamiliar. The work in the first half the semester will be designed to prepare them for a fuller, more engaged experience of the film festival in week 10, where they will be required to attend much of the festival, as well as participate in special sessions with invited film makers and guests. In the final weeks of the semester, we will tackle some of the most complex questions that surround documentary work, especially in the age of generative AI. Students will reflect on the festival experience and produce a final video essay or podcast that centers on questions of what it means to represent something “truthfully.”
An updated RFP to develop Essential Education Experience courses will be released later this summer. Any questions regarding the process and opportunities, please contact Steve Patchin, Project Manager for Essential Education Implementation at shpatchi@mtu.edu.
The SHAPE Essential Education Minors Working Group is tasked with identifying 15 themes for SHAPE Essential Education minors to be developed over the next three academic semesters. We are sharing our preliminary identification of themes and requesting feedback from the campus community.
As a reminder: SHAPE = Social Sciences, Humanities, & the Arts for People and the Economy/Environment. The SHAPE units on campus include: CLS, COB, CFRES, KIP, HU, Pavlis, SS, and VPA. The SHAPE Essential Education Minors will be hosted by SHAPE units and the majority of courses in the minors will be drawn from these units.
Please complete the feedback form by Wednesday, March 6, to provide your input!
On June 27, 2023, University Senate Proposal 18-23, “Proposal to Revise General Education Requirements (Essential Education) for Bachelor Degrees,” received final administrative approval. At the end of the fall 2023 semester, eight faculty and staff cross-curricular working groups were assembled and began full operation to implement the various components of the new Essential Education curriculum per the Senate proposal.
Following are mission descriptions for four of the eight Essential Education Implementation working groups. The other four working groups’ report-outs were published on Jan. 31.
If you have any questions, comments, or feedback about any of these working groups or about the implementation process, please contact the Essential Education Implementation Leadership Team at essential-ed-l@mtu.edu.
- Activities for Well-Being & Success Working Group
Activities for well-being and success foster students to connect with others, be active, restore their minds and bodies, and expand learning beyond the traditional classroom. This working group is reviewing the binning list created by the Course List Working Group to identify current courses that align with these goals, developing a process for the campus community to suggest activities, determining training/resource needs for instructors and liaising with the Assessment Working Group to determine assessment requirements for these courses. The group is developing a process for new course suggestions and a list of training and resources. - Essential Education Minors Working Group
This group is tasked with proposing 15 minor themes for development (or revision) into SHAPE Essential Education minors by spring 2025. These Essential Ed minors, an alternative to the Distribution Pathway courses, will be housed in SHAPE departments. This group will create a timeline for the development of these Essential Ed minors, a risk analysis report, a minor audit template, and a proposal for working groups for each minor. The group is currently analyzing the output of an interdisciplinary task force and previous working groups to identify recurring themes for potential Essential Ed minors. Meetings are being conducted with SHAPE units to assess interest and capacity as hosts and collaborators for these minors. They are also developing processes for reviewing minors for compliance with requirements and ensuring continued evaluation, support, and potential revisions to the minors.- The minors working group will submit an announcement in Tech Today later in February regarding preliminary themes identified for Essential Ed minor development, on which we encourage your feedback.
- The minors working group will submit an announcement in Tech Today later in February regarding preliminary themes identified for Essential Ed minor development, on which we encourage your feedback.
- Assessment Working Group
The group envisions a future state where faculty and staff appreciate that helping students learn is a collective activity: everyone does their part, and students grow in the Essential Education arena in ways that complement their degrees and positively impact their careers and other personal journeys after graduation. The group’s mission is to propose an overall structure for assessment, an implementation timeline, and a schedule that supports that future state. The group is reviewing previous Essential Ed work, as well as information about the current approach to general education assessment (including challenges, opportunities, issues, and recent pilots). - Marketing and Communication Advisory Board
This group’s role is to serve as an internal advisory board for University Marketing and Communications (UMC), liaising with other working groups and identifying communication and resource needs for advisors, faculty, students (current and prospective), and employers throughout the Essential Ed implementation process. The group’s current focus is assisting UMC’s first communication priority, which is a new series of pages on the Registrar’s website. These pages will serve as the “user manual” for Essential Ed, housing detailed program information and key advising materials.