Examples
Guidance for Proposing Courses for Core 2016 Requirements
In order to be approved as meeting a Core requirement (with the exception of the grandfathered writing intensive and capstone), the course must provide students with substantial opportunities to achieve the learning goals of the Core requirement.
The key difference for approval now versus in the past, is that the form asks for how the students engage with the material, rather than just a course description of the topics covered.
There are many ways to engage students so that they have the opportunities to achieve the learning goals of the Core Criteria. Examples include: discussions in small groups, writing assignments, projects, homework, interviewing experts, class problem solving, and many, many others.
In addition, there are many ways a course can be structured to enable the engagement of students with the material: topics and activities related to the learning goals may be threaded throughout the course; a module or unit of the course may be devoted entirely or primarily to topics and activities related to the learning goals; or topics and activities related to the learning goals may be taken up occasionally throughout the course, at varying levels of intensity.
In each case, it must be demonstrated that significant student effort is devoted to the learning goals of the Core category. For instance, a course proposer would need to show that a single module or unit within a course, and the activities described to engage the students, are of sufficient relevance, rigor, and duration that any team of faculty could reasonably judge that the students would be able to achieve the learning goals of the requirement at college-level proficiency.