Final Courses Now Being Developed For Next Year's Freshmen

January 15, 2014 History

ARHU's Ira Berlin weighs-in on on UMD's plans for it's new general education program.

ARHU's Ira Berlin weighs-in on on UMD's plans for it's new general education program.
By Yasmeen Abutaleb, The Diamondback

Although new students are beginning to chip away at the university's CORE requirements, officials are busy completely overhauling that curriculum and ensuring it will be ready for next year's freshmen.

...History professor Ira Berlin, who chaired the committee responsible for creating the new general education program — which passed the Senate in a landslide vote in April 2010 — said he has seen faculty in his department brainstorm ideas for new, innovative courses.
And although the university's original CORE program received a "D" from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni in its grading of nearly 1,000 institutions' general education programs, Berlin said he's confident the new program will earn the university national recognition. The council graded the CORE program based on how it fulfilled seven basic subjects, including science, math and foreign language, and found the program only fulfilled the composition and science requirements.
"I don't think when we wrote the [general education] program our aim was to satisfy [the American Council of Trustees and Alumni's] concerns, but I think in some ways we in fact have addressed some of those concerns," he said. "We undertook a revision of CORE because we thought it was a program that was in place for a long time and we wanted to review it, and in the end we decided that the best thing to do … was to replace CORE, and that's what the new program does."