The Council on Academic Affairs will vote Thursday on a new music major and offering a women’s studies course online.

The music department currently offers a music degree with performance option and a music degree with teacher certification.

The proposal is for a Bachelor of Arts in Music degree that would require 74 to 79 total semester hours.

Paul Johnston, a music professor, said the new major would focus on music more broadly and would not involve any new courses.

He said the decrease in required credit hours would give students more flexibility to study other things.

“Right now the performance major and teacher certification options both require a lot of credit hours, so it’s not really very practical that people can major in music and have another major,” he said. “The thought behind this is that this would allow folks to pursue a major in music while also pursuing other academic interests.”

The council will also vote on revisions to three sequential “Music History and Literature” courses and revisions to the honors versions of those courses.

Johnston said the proposed changes would reorder the topics covered in music history.

“There aren’t substantial changes; we’re just taking content from one class and moving it to another class,” he said. “The whole purpose of that is just so that when people study music history, they study it in a chronological fashion.”

Revisions to “WST 2309G: Women, Men and Culture” would allow off-campus students to take the course through technology delivery.

Jeannie Ludlow, an English professor and the coordinator of women’s studies, said the course should be open to off-campus students because it meets multiple requirements. As a general education course, it meets diversity and social science requirements and is writing-intensive.

“The primary reason is we feel like it’d be very appealing to those off campus,” she said. “It’s really an introduction to the idea that gender can be an interesting way to understanding the world.”

She said on-campus students would only have the option of taking the face-to-face version.

“Women’s studies as a field is committed to pedagogy, the science and art of teaching; that works best when you have interaction,” she said.

She said students sometimes respond emotionally to material in class or topics that are brought up, and she can respond to them best when seeing their reactions in person.

She also said off-campus students should not be left out of learning the material.

 The council will meet at 3 p.m. Thursday in Room 4440 of Booth Library.

Stephanie Markham can be reached at 581-2812 or [email protected].