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With course registration for the fall 2023 semester beginning Thursday, Syracuse University has incorporated new ‘course tagging’ tools to create guidelines and structure to aid with course selection.

The new feature — developed by the University Senate’s Ad Hoc Committee on Shared Competencies and the Office of Academic Affairs — categorizes classes based on the academic goals, or shared competencies, they satisfy. Chris Johnson, professor and associate provost for academic affairs and a member of the committee, said the goal for the feature is to better tailor the process of identifying courses toward a student’s individual interests.

Students can access the class search function on MySlice by selecting “Shared Competencies” under the “Course Attribute” tab. Students can pick one of the six goals they want a course to fulfill, according to SU’s Institutional Effectiveness webpage for course tagging. The MySlice schedule builder also incorporates course tags as filters.

The shared competencies comprise six university-wide goals that students are expected to acquire through courses and extracurriculars — ethics; integrity and commitment to diversity and inclusion; critical and creative thinking; scientific inquiry and research skills; civic and global responsibility; communication skills and information literacy and technological agility.

Anne Mosher, SU’s provost faculty fellow for shared competencies and high impact practices, said the university’s process of creating the competencies started in 2019. The competencies were originally SU’s institutional learning goals that they would submit to the Middle States Commission on Higher Education for accreditation. These goals were brought to the University Senate to come up with an idea to bring them to students, Mosher said.

“One of the fears that has been expressed by some faculty, staff and students was that we had just come up with a set of learning goals and it was like a box checking exercise,” Mosher said. “And all along, the committee wanted to do more than that.”

Johnson said the competencies enable SU to meet its general education requirements for accreditation. After the committee met with faculty members to assist in the tagging process, they saw how it could benefit students on top of functioning as a tool to maintain accreditation, Johnson said.

“We could have done that quietly and not made those tags public,” Johnson said. “But we realized very early on that the tags could actually be quite a powerful and useful tool for students and advisors in terms of customizing a student’s academic experience.”

Johnson said the new feature will be especially helpful for students choosing elective courses and will help advisors as they go about assisting students with the course selection process.

Each undergraduate course is tagged with up to three shared competencies covered in the curriculum, SU’s release announcing the system reads. To assign competencies, professors fill out a written form called a reflection for each course, which the committee reviews and incorporates the tags. Between 30% and 50% of three-credit courses are tagged this semester, but the committee intends to tag any remaining classes by the fall 2024 semester, Mosher said.

Despite the lack of tagged courses, committee member and accounting professor Joyce Zadzilka said the courses that have received assignments so far stand to be significantly beneficial to students’ research and learning.

“The tags can help identify potential courses that they can further research to see if they meet any prerequisites, and if they do, then they have the opportunity to dive more deeply into a shared competency, be it one they want to get better at or one they find will benefit them over the long run,” Zadzilka said.

Johnson said the course tagging is still a work in progress and students can expect to see the full extent and benefit of the tags next year.

“This is an ongoing thing,” Johnson said. “It’ll be part of our academic life here at the university for a long, long time.”

Published on April 6, 2023 at 12:46 am