By Justin Muszynski

The Faculty Senate’s Ad Hoc General Education Committee announced Thursday that they are running a blog allowing members of the campus community to give their opinion about general education and what it should consist of in the case of a redesign.

The committee says that the blog site has existed for some time now, but that the first post about general education and a possible revision to it was put up on Wednesday and the email letting students know this went out the next day. They hope to get everyone’s ideas about what general education should be and this is one way that they can do that.

“The committee hopes to facilitate a campus-wide conversation about general education at CCSU,” says Robert Wolff, chair of the Ad Hoc Committee. “The blog format allows all members of the campus community to share their ideas.”

The blog will be active all the way through finals but will more than likely not be used in the summer. Wolff says he hopes to reactivate it in the fall for a couple of weeks before the committee puts a draft together. This is just one of the several steps they have taken to gather input from the campus community.

They conducted a survey amongst faculty this semester that showed of the 230 members surveyed, 61.3 percent either agree or strongly agree that the general education system should be redesigned.  They also hosted several open meetings in Founders Hall that allowed people to voice their concerns in person.

Any draft of a general education redesign would be put together by the committee in the fall. They hope any draft will be approved by the spring of 2012 and begin to take effect in the fall of 2013.  If this were to happen, any student coming in prior to the fall semester of 2013 would have the option to either fulfill the requirements of the current general education system or the new one.

The current system was put in place in 1998 and requires a minimum of 44 to 46 credits in general education studies, not including the foreign language department, and has four study areas and four skill areas.

As far as what’s next for the committee in the informational gathering phase that they are in, it’s uncertain at this point.

“It’s an important step in gathering info but I can’t say now whether it will be the last,” says Wolff. “That will depend upon what we learn.”