Background: Ohio State is expected to switch from quarters to semesters starting in Summer of 2012. As part of this switch, all departments are required to submit proposals detailing how their degree programs will be revised as well as proposals for the courses that will be offered in the department once the switch takes place. The programs in the College of Engineering have asked to be in the first round of proposal submissions.
The CSE Dept. appointed a Semester Task Force (STF) in early Spring 2009 to coordinate our efforts for the switch. The STF included a number of faculty representing the various course groups, the chairs of the Curriculum, Graduate Studies, and Undergrad Studies committees, graduate and undergraduate student representatives, and the Undergrad Advisor. The committee met a few times during Sp '09 and regularly during Au '09. By the end of Au '09, STF made its recommendations regarding the BS-CSE program to faculty. Faculty met at a mini-retreat on Dec. 10 and approved a somewhat modified version of one of the proposals that STF made. The approved version is available here. It is worth noting that some details were left unspecified in that version; for example, whether there will be a single "project" course that all students will take or there will be multiple versions of the course (similar to the multiple capstone design courses that we currently have).
During Winter 2010, individual course groups worked on deciding the details of courses in their respective groups. A group also worked on the project course(s) and the replacement for the current 601. The STF continued to meet weekly to coordinate these efforts; for example, with dealing with such issues as prerequisite courses, etc. and to keep each group aware of the activities of the other groups. By the end of Wi '10, all groups had come up with reasonably complete drafts of the contents of the courses in their groups including the expected outcomes for each course and their relation to the BS-CSE program outcomes. The complete proposal for the semester version of the BS-CSE program, including these course syllabuses, were submitted to CCAA in early April '10. The submitted proposal is available here.
Structure of CGRs: During Spring 2010 (and possibly beyond), each group is expected to complete a Course Group Report (CGR) detailing the newly proposed courses, their outcomes, relation to BS-CSE outcomes, etc. These reports are based on the existing CGRs but have been adapted to focus on the switch to semesters. These reports will, as they are completed, be added to the list below. One point to note is that portions of these reports will be nearly identical to the corresponding portions of the most recent CGRs of the same groups. This information is repeated in these reports so they can be read independently on their own. Each of these reports is/should be organized as follows:
We should note here that one important result of the extensive discussions that took place as part of developing the semester transition plans was a refinement of the scale used to specify the level of achievement of each intended outcome in each course. Currently, we use three levels: mastery, familiarity, and exposure (see details). During our discussions, it became clear that there was another category which did not quite rise to the level of "mastery" but was superior to "familiarity". Hence we have now split the scale to four levels: mastery, competence, familiarity, and exposure. The semester syllabuses will use this new scale; some of the current syllabuses may also be revised to use the new scale although many will probably not, given that we have a relatively short period to go before the transition.
[Notes: This is perhaps the most important section of the report since any changes we decide to make or not make in various courses should be based mainly on results of assessing the current effectiveness of the courses. In particular, it is important to include an evaluation of how well the various intended outcomes of each course are being achieved or not achieved.Each course in the group should be considered in turn and its assessment results from each of the applicable assessment tools summarized. In the case of student activities (such as projects, exams) in the course, the discussion, as noted above, should focus on what the activities and student performance in those activities indicate about the course and how well it contributes to achieving various outcomes and, especially, possible ideas for changes in the course to improve the achievement of these outcomes, rather than individual students. Similarly, conclusions based on the SEIs should focus on how well the course achieves its outcomes and ideas for changes that will help improve the achievement. Ideally, this summary should be organized by the intended outcomes of the course in question; i.e., for each outcome, summarize the results from the applicable assessments. At the same time, it is recognized that this may be somewhat problematic because many in-course assessments, especially things like homeworks, midterms, etc., are not organized by outcomes but rather by course topics which may not map in a one-to-one fashion to course outcomes.Assessment vs. evaluation: Some important comments on terminology: ABET uses the term "assessment" to mean the assessment tools and their administration, for example, our POCAT or the rubrics we use to assess oral communication skills; and the raw results from these assessments. The term "evaluation" is used to mean analysis of these results and conclusions, based on this analysis, about changes that should be made in individual courses or in the program as a whole. To avoid potential confusion, we should use these terms in the same manner. One other important point: from the ABET point of view, the focus of the assessment/evaluation activities is improvement in the courses/program rather than in the individual student. Thus while activities such as midterm exams provide useful feedback to students in a course, they are relevant here only to the extent that information from these activities and analysis of that information helps identify possible improvements in the course(s); so that should be the focus of the discussion.
Our main assessment tools are: student performance in the courses in homeworks, projects, midterms, finals; SEIs; POCAT, the multiple-choice exit test that BS-CSE majors take before graduation; and other assessments that may be unique to particular courses, especially the rubrics used in the various capstone courses and in CSE 601. The raw results from the assessments in 601 and the capstone courses using the various rubrics (and the rubrics themselves) are available on-line. These are most relevant for the professional outcomes CGR. The raw results from each POCAT are also available on-line; but those results can be interpreted only in conjunction with the questions on the tests which are also accessible (password protected) from the same page. These are relevant to the respective courses which appear in the various CGRs and may, depending on the particular questions, be relevant to prerequisite courses and/or for "post-requisite" courses.]
POCAT provides an especially valuable assessment since POCAT questions are related to specific course outcomes and focus on conceptual, big-picture issues in the particular courses. Moreover, if after evaluating a set of POCAT results about a particular course outcome, the faculty involved with the course feel that the problem might lie in a prerequisite course, they could create a suitable student activity that they could administer at the start of the course to see if their conjecture was correct. It is also worth noting that as of Spring '10, POCAT questions exist only for the required high-level courses and a couple of the popular tech electives; moreover, these questions were not designed to be specifically related to particular course outcomes. We are in the process of addressing these issues. The individual CGRs below should address progress with respect to this important activity as well.
List of CGRs: Each CGR will be presented to the Curriculum Committee for its feedback. Links to each CGR will, as the CGR gets completed, will be added below.