By now I hope you have all heard a bit about the update to the USG General Education Curriculum, now called Core IMPACTS. The Chancellor highlighted it in his most recent communication to faculty, and most especially the connection to the purpose of the Core and helping students understand the essential value of the courses they take.
Core IMPACTS ensures students acquire essential knowledge across a range of disciplines, helping them understand the ways that the world can be known not just in their chosen area, but also preparing them to be able to integrate and synthesize knowledge, and to know when they may need to reach into their “academic toolbox” for a different way of understanding a problem.
A Purpose-first Core
For bachelor’s students, Core IMPACTS represents more than one-third of their degrees, and they are very often the majority of the courses they will encounter in their first year (or more) of college. While we have long focused on Core courses for the content that students engage in, we have often been less forthright about the skills we are building along the way.
While the structure of the Core is largely unchanged, we are asking for a significant change in the way we talk to students – and ourselves – about General Education. The new Core IMPACTS asks faculty teaching Core courses to make explicit both the why – the reason the course has value to the student’s overall learning – and the how – the skills, strategies and techniques that are embedded in the course that translate into competencies necessary to thrive at work, life and community.
Core IMPACTS does not exist to make students well-rounded (although it certainly accomplishes that), but to help them see different ways to understand the world and to know – both in college, but especially afterwards – how to use a variety of tools to tackle the sort of complex problems and challenges that the future holds.
Starting with the Syllabus
To make sure we put this purpose first, there are new expectations for syllabus statements for courses in Core Impacts that outline a broad orienting question, system-wide learning outcome (which is in addition to your course-level learning outcomes), and career-ready competencies. (You can access sample syllabus statements for the seven Core IMPACTS areas through MomentumU under Teaching Toolkits and Guides).
Making It Real
Of course, a syllabus statement is really only a beginning. Core IMPACTS asks faculty to talk with students about the value of the skills included in their courses, both to their success in college and beyond. To make this ring true, I encourage you to be explicit in talking about this as you engage in activities, projects, assessments and more. For any faculty who have worked on TiLT (Transparency in Learning and Teaching) practices, this will be familiar territory. For those who may be just starting off on this, a key question I’ve been thinking about for any course in Core IMPACT is “with would I want students to remember from this course in two years, most especially if it was the LAST one they will take in my discipline?” | 
