CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT AND APPROVAL PROCESS
To uphold the program quality, all curricular change proposals must go through a three-level approval procedure:
At Division / Program-level, the Divisional UG / PG Committees are responsible for curriculum development. These committees are chaired by the UG/PG Coordinators and include 3-4 faculty members as members and an administrative staff as the Secretary. For T&M-DDP, the program's Management Committee is responsible for curriculum development. The Management Committee is chaired by the Program Director and includes Co-directors and 1-2 teaching faculty as members and an administrative staff as the Secretary.
At School-level, Associate Deans (UG / PG) of the four Schools as well as Program Directors serve as members of the Interdisciplinary UG / PG Studies Committee (IUSC / IPSC). Since AIS's programs are interdisciplinary in nature, Schools' involvement in IUSC / IPSC ensures our programs adopt a broad and interdisciplinary perspective, facilitates communications across schools and AIS, and enables issues and concerns be addressed effectively.
At University-level, the Committee on Undergraduate Studies (CUS), the Committee on Undergraduate Core Education (CUCE) and the Committee on Postgraduate Studies (CPS) have the principal responsibility for the approval of programs and courses including benchmarking the curriculum, approval of graduation, and monitoring of assessment and academic standards. The Senate is the supreme academic body of the University responsible for setting and reviewing academic policies.
The three-level approval procedure ensures that the curricular proposals are made in line with the program's objectives, school's requirements and University's guidelines, and comments from all parties in concern have been addressed.
Details of program and course approval procedure can be found from the following websites:
The Student Feedback Questionnaire (SFQ) provides a key source of information on the delivery of courses and feedback for faculty and graduate teaching assistants on students’ response to their work. This feedback is part of the evidence used to evaluate their performance.
Near the end of each term, students complete the course evaluation questionnaire on the Web. Data collected are then processed and analyzed by the system, which generates reports and distributes them on-line. Instructors are able to view their own teaching evaluation reports online, including students' responses to open-ended questions. Summary statistics are also available for Deans and Department Heads to understand school / department overall statistics, on top of the scores of individual courses and instructors.
Our Division of Environment and Sustainability conducts mid-term course review during Week 6 to Week 7. Comments from student are sent to the respective course instructors, who should address to students' concerns and take actions to improve teaching as appropriate. The Division Head also reviews the course review results and meets with some of the course instructors to discuss how teaching performance and students' learning experience can be enhanced.