Further Information About GELOs (General Education Learning Outcomes)
The Provost’s Assessment Committee for General Education Learning Outcomes (PAC-GELO) was formed in the Fall of 2016. It was initially charged with developing tools and processes to assess the extent to which UAS undergraduate students are acquiring academic skills broadly expected through the completion of UAS General Education Requirements (GER) coursework. Since its inception, the committee has included a range of faculty members from across all three UAS campuses and across various disciplines. These include the schools of Education and Career Education, as well as the Arts & Sciences’ departments of Humanities, Social Sciences, Natural Sciences, and Business and Public Administration.
The committee began to work on identifying and creating General Education Learning Outcomes (GELO) soon after representatives from the committee attended an Association of American Colleges & Universities (AAC&U) workshop in February 2017. Initially, the committee used resources collected from the AAC&U workshop to develop the first versions of the GELOs. These GELOs were shared with the Faculty Senate to gather faculty input, and the GELOs were ultimately approved by the Faculty Senate in November 2019. Since that time, the outcomes have undergone occasional revisions, each time returning to Faculty Senate for approval.
The PAC-GELO usually assesses a minimum of two GELOs per semester in two-hour workshops that are held virtually at the end of each semester. Each semester’s workshop is scheduled for two hours in a Zoom session, with participants assessing a single artifact with five to seven randomly selected student work samples per artifact set. An artifact is a written assignment, created by an instructor to assess a student's learning. The student work samples are assessed by this committee based on the GELO rubrics. Workshop participants consist of faculty members from varied disciplines.
At the start of a workshop, the facilitator describes the assessment process. Then participants go through a norming process where each person reads and rates the first few student work samples individually. As a group, they then discuss consistencies and discrepancies in each participant's ratings. Then participants work individually to assess the rest. The group collects notes for further refining the GELO rubrics and for improving the workshop process overall.
In initial workshops for the Environmental and Community Engagement GELO, the committee determined that it would need a customized artifact for this GELO, given the broad scope of the rubric’s categories. The committee worked with the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on Alaska Native Education (CACANE) over the past year to discuss options for a tailored artifact that could be administered across multiple courses that meet the UAS Alaska Native Knowledge Graduation Requirement (ANKGR).
From these conversations, in 2024, an artifact was created and administered to students in a 100-level Alaska Native Studies course that fulfills the Alaska Native Knowledge Graduation Requirement.