Proposal #80
Proposal Title: rethinking science labs for non-science majors
Anticipated Savings/Revenue:
Units affected: COSE
Impacted Degrees/Courses: all non-science, non-health related majors
Brief Description of Proposal:
I wonder if there's a cheaper, more efficient way to offer general education lab/field courses to non-science and health-related majors. Does every student need a full-blown semester-long laboratory course? Over the past few years we've not been able to keep up with the demand made by the exponential increase in lower division students we've admitted. One fallout of that is that students who need a lab end up registering for it a semester or more after they've taken the lecture, and fill up all the sections before the end of EPR. So the students in current classes can't get a concurrent lab. Geosciences is trying to fix that by creating new courses that include the lab, but our current GE requires but a single L/F course so we also actually do need some stand alone lecture classes. But could the non-majors take a course that's just a few weeks or weekends long rather than a full semester? That would free up some lab space for the COSE and pre-health majors who actually need lab courses.
I also think that one unintended (or even intended) consequence of such a re-thinking of labs for non-scientists is that they might fire up the imagination of these students in such a way that they might in fact choose to learn MORE about science!
Lots of other campuses offer courses like "math for poets" (I think we should rethink quantitative reasoning as well as lab sciences to design courses that would better appeal to non-math-oriented students).
Note: Proposals are posted as submitted, without
editing other than to remove the submitter's contact information.
