When Terry Gustafson joined the Ohio State faculty as an assistant professor in 1979, it’s doubtful he would have been able to predict what he’d be doing today.
While Gustafson is still a professor of chemistry at OSU, and now the executive associate dean of the College of the Arts and Sciences, his primary responsibilities lie elsewhere. Gustafson co-convenes a committee whose responsibility is to oversee curriculum changes during the university’s move to semesters in 2012.
Just how much time does he devote to issues regarding the semester switch?
“An ever-increasing amount,” he said with a laugh.
“My role within Arts and Sciences is shifting more to just being related to the semester conversion. It may get to 100 percent by summer.”
The committee on curriculum is one of seven sub-committees formed to oversee the transition to semesters. Their responsibility is to provide each department with information to format their courses to be approved as semester-length.
“I’m sure when you’ve gone to look for courses every term, you see this lengthy list,” he said. “Well, all of those are currently designed for quarters.”
“Now what [the departments] have to do is say, ‘These are the courses we currently offer our students so they can be the best graduates they can be. How do we structure our program under semesters to accomplish that same process?'”
Every course will have to go under a review process and be approved by the Council on Academic Affairs before it can be offered in the semester system in 2012 — which means that each department must have their proposals submitted to the council long before that time.
“It turns out that the curriculum needs to be in place by autumn 2011,” Gustafon says. “That’s coming up real fast.”
This means that the review process must start well before that. The target is to have submitted all the reformatted courses by this time next year. The College of Engineering is slated to be the first department reviewed by the council this spring.
But Arts and Sciences will be the big challenge for Gustafson and the rest of the committee, as it encompasses approximately half the student body.
“I think all of us just want to do a time-warp to autumn 2012 and say, ‘Yes, it’s done!’ But there’s a lot of work to be done between now and then,” he says. “What we’re trying to do is expedite the review process in a way that makes sense, that doesn’t over-burden the faculty, but at the same time make sure we’re not shorting our
students.”
Gustafson says some courses will simply spread their material out over 14 weeks instead of 10, while others will “re-think their entire program.”
He said he hopes students will embrace the process, no matter how complicated it may seem.
“There’s change that can be really good,” he said. “I think this process has been really helpful in allowing the faculty to think about what they really want for their students. I believe in the long run, the students win.”
