The Council of Academic Affairs unanimously approved three new courses for the departments communication and disorders and sciences, chemistry and biochemistry and world languages and cultures.

CAA met virtually on Wednesday and approved new courses: CDS-4500, CHM-4780 and WLE-4800.

The CDS-4500 course is within the department of communication and disorders and sciences and will be an elective for undergraduates to give an introduction to medical speech language pathology that is taught to graduate students.

Nichole Mulvey, a communications and disorders and sciences assistant professor and graduate coordinator, presented to CAA about the new course.

“Our graduate students get a lot of information in this particular course line, but we don’t have anything like that in the undergraduate,” Mulvey said. “And so this is a 4000 level course, our intent is that students would be able to take it as an elective at this time. The reason for that being [an elective] is that right now if we have students who transfer in, they already are very packed in being able to get the required courses… Students who come in a more traditional sense and have four years have plenty of room to take an elective by their senior year.”

CAA approved unanimously with revisions for the new course.

CAA approved CHM-4780 unanimously with revisions as well.

CHM-4780 is a chemistry and biochemistry course designed to be an elective course offered every fall semester about x-ray crystallography. 

Edward Treadwell, chemistry and biochemistry department chair, informed the CAA about the new course.

“It’s an x-ray crystallography, which is basically bouncing x-rays into a sample, the electrons ship the atoms to bounce off, and so you’re able to actually tell structures from there, which is sort of a huge thing for both industry and research and all sorts of things,” Treadwell said.

CAA unanimously approved the new course with revisions.

The WLE-4800 course is a new course planned to start in the summer 2023 semester about the world languages and cultures department focused on methods theory and pedagogy for the teaching of world languages.

Christiane Eydt-Beebe, department chair of world languages and culture, presented to CAA the plans for this new course.

“The course is basically a spiraled up or elevated version of our existing methods course that we teach at the 3000 level, WLE-3400, Edyt-Beebe said. “But this one, the elevated version, integrates more assignments that ask students to prove their research abilities as well as their knowledge of theory, so the assignments are structured differently.”

CAA unanimously approved the new course without revisions.

CAA also approved two course revisions and one program revision.

Mulvey presented the changes to the CDS-4600 Seminar in Communication Disorders and Sciences and changes to the communication disorders and sciences major.

The CDS-4600 course is being revised to be listed as a capstone course rather than a seminar, and the major revision is to update the required courses listed for changes made since the major was last updated.

Both the course and major revisions were approved unanimously by CAA with revisions to the proposals.

Lastly, CAA approved course changes to a statistical methods in psychology course to change the course’s number level to be a 3000 level.

This change was approved unanimously with revisions by CAA.

Madelyn Kidd can be reached at 581-2812 or at [email protected].