Thank you for the work that you did during this academic year and for the report that I recently received.

You have addressed the issues very thoughtfully and have further refined the thinking regarding this new (for us) approach to ongoing review.  The pilot project conducted by the faculty of the Department of History certainly demonstrated the level of work and of utility of this approach, and, with the planned pilot project with departments in the College of Management next fall should, this work should put us in a position to come to an university decision on this approach.

You may be aware that I recommended to this year's UCCC, and they agreed, that it suspend all regular reviews of courses and curricula for the 198-99 year while they attended to a careful study of the course and curricular "rules and regulations" that would need to be in place and understood to move to the new approach to review as well as to consult with the ad hoc committee on its work during the year.

In two areas of your work, I have a few suggestions:
1) Electronification.  I would caution against moving to "electronify" everything that is now handled on paper only for the review process.  For the review process, we should consider to what detail which materials need to be widely available electronically.  Surely, in the department of program, having detailed documentation in electronic form has great potential for   assisting faculty in teaching courses and for maintaining historical information.  However, it may not be necessary to have the same detailed material configured for presentation on the web, for example, for purposes of review.

2) Review process.  Some attention should be given to the process of periodic review and who does it.   While what you have proposed provides a great framework for the more or less continuous collection and organization of descriptive, qualitative, and quantitative information about the nature of courses and curricula and about the assessment of outcomes, implicit is a periodic "snapshot" review that might be done several ways.
a) There might be a standing committee, much like the UCCC, that does the reviews.  I suspect that this approach would quickly suffer some of the same conditions as does the current UCCC review and with an overburden of "stuff" to review.
b) There might be a panel of faculty from  which review teams might be formed, representing related disciplines, service course providers and users, and GER providers and users, which reviews the self study and makes recommendations, the summaries of which and responses to which a "UCCC-like" group might review.
c) Modification of the above in which "industry" and/or peer institution reps might be included (much like disciplinary accreditation teams.)
d) Others?

I will do my best to assemble the resources needed for the work next year, and I appreciate the willingness to continuing members to continue the work next year.  As Jim Mulholland moves on to the bliss of retirement, let us all thank him for his service on the committee and for the exemplary work he led in the Department of History in this connection. Many thanks to all of you for your fine work this year.

I will seek agreement for service from Susan Blanchard (1998-99 UCCC chair, or designee), Louis Harrison (Computer Science), and Louis Hunt (Reg & Records), and upon receiving it, reappoint the committee as you recommended in your report for another year.

Your report is on the web at http://www.ncsu.edu/provost/governance/Ad_hoc/CUAPDRPI/

Thanks.

-Frank

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