Compass Curriculum Syllabus Description

What to Include in the Syllabus Description

As you compose your course syllabus we ask that you please include a short description of how your course fits into the Compass Curriculum. For instance, if your course is designated as Explore with additional flagged components, like Writing Intensive, please include relevant Explore and Writing Intensive description points on your syllabus. We provide examples below that you can cut and paste into your syllabus and point out for your students.

Including these descriptors in your course materials will help reinforce for undergraduate students that the Compass Curriculum is a cohesive set of requirements for completing their UCCS degrees, a message that aligns with information students receive during orientation, advising, and in their other Compass Curriculum courses. As faculty you led general education revision. We need your help reinforcing the importance of the Compass Curriculum in an intentional way for your students.

Please include the following in your course syllabus for your Compass Curriculum approved course:

This course is part of the Compass Curriculum. The Compass Curriculum is the signature undergraduate education program at UCCS for all majors and all colleges. This program endeavors to provide you with the tools for professional and personal success that you will need when you graduate. The program includes skills that employers say that they want students to have from their education (critical thinking, oral and written communication, ethics, innovation, problem-solving, understanding inclusiveness, and sustainability).

Please include the following descriptions of the Compass Curriculum as appropriate for your course. Feel free to revise which Essential Learning Outcomes are listed for your course, but please include an appropriate set from this list.

Compass Essential Learning Outcomes and Course Goals:

GPS courses help you learn more about:

  • What a university education means and why it is important.
  • Acting as a responsible, academically professional university student with the necessary civic, ethical, and social competencies.
  • Navigating campus technology and online databases; cultivate research skills; and locate campus resources that will help you succeed.
  • Refining your critical and analytical speaking, and listening skills.

Essential Learning Outcomes:

  • Gather, critically analyze and evaluate quantitative information within relevant disciplinary contexts.
  • Gather, critically analyze and evaluate qualitative information within relevant disciplinary contexts.
  • Apply and integrate knowledge from a range of disciplines, including interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary research.
  • Communicate through reading and/or writing to receive, comprehend, and convey information.
  • Communicate through a prepared, purposeful, presentation or goal-oriented interpersonal or group interaction.

ENGL 1310 is the first core writing course across the university. ENGL 1410, ENGL 2080, ENGL 2090, or INOV 2100 are the second writing course options across the university.

Writing Program courses help you learn about the Compass Goal Evaluate and Create:

  • Critical and creative thinking
  • Qualitative reasoning
  • Communication (in the written form)

Essential Learning Outcomes:

  • Gather, critically analyze and evaluate qualitative information within relevant disciplinary contexts.
  • Apply and integrate knowledge from a range of disciplines, including interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary research.
  • Communicate through reading and/or writing to receive, comprehend, and convey information.
  • Demonstrate the core ethical principles and responsible methods of your discipline.

Courses approved at the college level for Quantitative Reasoning are approved for that component for the Compass Curriculum.

Quantitative Reasoning courses help students learn:

  • How to construct a logical argument based on the rules of inference.
  • Analyze and interpret numerical data.
  • How to apply mathematical methods to solve problems in university work and daily life.

Essential Learning Outcomes:

  • Gather, critically analyze and evaluate quantitative information within relevant disciplinary contexts.
  • Demonstrate the core ethical principles and responsible methods of your discipline.

Explore courses help you learn about:

  • Specific methods of producing and discussing knowledge.
  • Connections between this area of study and other disciplines.
  • Thinking critically and creatively at the level required of a university student.
  • Core ethical principles and responsible research methods of this discipline.

Essential Learning Outcomes:

  • Gather, critically analyze and evaluate quantitative information within relevant disciplinary contexts
  • Gather, critically analyze and evaluate qualitative information within relevant disciplinary contexts
  • Apply and integrate knowledge from a range of disciplines, including interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary research
  • Demonstrate the core ethical principles and responsible methods of your discipline

Please consider adding to your syllabus:

This course is a Navigate course in the Compass Curriculum. Navigate courses provide UCCS students with a common educational experience at the upper division level that broadly expands their perspective beyond their major discipline. An objective is to engage students actively in applying and integrating knowledge, which is drawn from a range of disciplines and includes advanced-level critical thinking. An objective of Navigate courses is to promote curricular and intellectual connections between students’ coursework for the Compass Curriculum and the work they do for their academic majors, while providing students an opportunity to integrate their learning, ideally beyond their disciplinary area of study.

Navigate courses help you learn about:

  • How academic knowledge and skills can be applied to solve practical problems outside of your disciplinary area of study. This is the “knowledge in action” component of the course.
  • Intellectual and curricular intersections between your major coursework and other areas as a way to integrate and apply learning.
  • Explore what it takes to work with different types of people with different perspectives.

Essential Learning Outcomes:

  • Apply and integrate knowledge from a range of disciplines, including interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary research.
  • Gather, critically analyze and evaluate quantitative information within relevant disciplinary contexts.
  • Gather, critically analyze and evaluate qualitative information within relevant disciplinary contexts.
  • Demonstrate the core ethical principles and responsible methods of your discipline.

Inclusiveness courses help you learn about:

  • The dynamics and systemic and historical aspects of inclusion and exclusion
  • Ways that inclusivity (and exclusivity) are generated at local, national, and global levels

Essential Learning Outcomes:

  • Articulate origins, influences, and impacts of inclusion and exclusion within societies.
  • Gather, critically analyze and evaluate quantitative information within relevant disciplinary contexts.
  • Gather, critically analyze and evaluate qualitative information within relevant disciplinary contexts.
  • Apply and integrate knowledge from a range of disciplines, including interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary research.
  • Demonstrate the core ethical principles and responsible methods of your discipline.

Writing Intensive courses help you learn how to:

  • Approach writing as a process.
  • Revise your written work based on feedback.
  • Provide useful feedback to your classmates about their written work.
  • Refine your critical and analytical writing skills.

Essential Learning Outcomes:

  • Gather, critically analyze and evaluate quantitative information within relevant disciplinary contexts.
  • Gather, critically analyze and evaluate qualitative information within relevant disciplinary contexts.
  • Apply and integrate knowledge from a range of disciplines, including interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary research.
  • Communicate through reading and/or writing to receive, comprehend, and convey information.
  • Demonstrate the core ethical principles and responsible methods of your discipline.

Sustainability courses help you learn about:

  • The history of human-nature interaction
  • The long-term consequences of human interaction with nature

Essential Learning Outcomes:

  • Explain sustainable practices and impacts relative to the interaction between human development and the natural world.
  • Gather, critically analyze and evaluate quantitative information within relevant disciplinary contexts.
  • Gather, critically analyze and evaluate qualitative information within relevant disciplinary contexts.
  • Apply and integrate knowledge from a range of disciplines, including interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary research.

Students take a Summit Experience in their major in order to graduate. Summit courses bridge general education goals with discipline objectives resulting in an enriching and culminating experience in a student’s undergraduate education. Core components of Summit courses include a focus on core ethical principles of the discipline as well as communication skills.

Summit courses help students learn:

  • Critical or creative thinking.
  • Quantitative or Qualitative reasoning.
  • Communication (public speaking/presenting, interpersonal (one to one) and/or group communication, or digital, visual, and performance media.)
  • Core ethical principles in the discipline.

Essential Learning Outcomes (choose those appropriate for your course):

  • Gather, critically analyze and evaluate quantitative information within relevant disciplinary contexts.
  • Gather, critically analyze and evaluate qualitative information within relevant disciplinary contexts.
  • Communicate through a prepared, purposeful, presentation or goal-oriented interpersonal or group interaction.*,**
  • Demonstrate the core ethical principles and responsible methods of your discipline.*

* These are required aspects of a Summit course or experience. You can choose to focus on either quantitative or qualitative information.

**Faculty. Note that support and resources are available to help you with the communication aspect of your Summit course. Please see the Compass Curriculum Faculty Homepage for a description of communication in Summit courses. Look under the section “Policies and Course Snapshots” on the Compass Curriculum faculty homepage for this information. Prof. Erica Allgood, (eallgood@uccs.edu, Director of the Communication Center) or Prof. Sherry Morreale, (smorreal@uccs.edu, Dept. of Communication) are available to collaborate directly with faculty to incorporate communication into their Summit courses.