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IDEAS PROCESS
During the Fall 2004 semester, the General Education Restructuring Team engaged the services of Dr. Eileen Hogan, dean of the College of Business, to help us set up an IDEAS process similar to that which had been used so successfully two years ago for Strategic Planning. For those unfamiliar with IDEAS, it is a process for obtaining input from interested parties. Questions, ideas, suggestions, etc., are distributed for comments. Respondents are invited to answer the questions, as well as to provide their own ideas, comments, and suggestions. A Synthesis Team, independent of the requesting body, receives all the diverse comments and synthesizes them into a report. That report, with respondents names removed, is then forwarded to the requesting body. The independence of the Synthesis Team and the confidentiality of the respondents is meant to insure a fair and impartial analysis of the responses. It is important to note that IDEAS is not meant to be a referendum, but rather just another vehicle for generating ideas (hence the name), a form of brainstorming if you will. It is then up to the receiving body to decide how to handle the input it receives.
In our case, the General Education Restructuring Team asked the faculty for comments about what we have identified as essential elements for a sound and vibrant General Education program at KU. A description of each element, along with specific questions about each, was distributed in November 2004 with responses due by the end of the semester.
A broad-based Synthesis Team, consisting of Joanne Bucks (Library), Roberta Crisson (Speech Communication and Theatre), Dave Haas (Management), Chris Sacchi (Biological Sciences), and Teresa Stahler (Secondary Education), then synthesized the results over the break between semesters. Their report was delivered to the General Education Restructuring Team in January 2005 and is now posted here for the university community at large. Thank you to all who participated and especially to the Synthesis Team for all their hard work.
Below you will find an Executive Summary from the Synthesis Team (in PDF format), as well as the actual, unedited responses (in Microsoft Word format), collated by element. Also included is the original IDEAS document that was submitted to the faculty back in November (also in PDF format).