IHUM courses meet the mandates described in the Faculty Senate Legislation for:
IHUM courses engage first-year students in exploration of fundamental and enduring questions about what it means to be human. They promote student-centered pedagogy. Faculty lectures frame the course texts with unifying themes and provide the background and context necessary for freshmen to connect productively with the assigned written, visual, and multi-media material. Small-group discussions guide students in developing interpretative and analytical skills, in raising rigorous questions, and in producing original and insightful answers to those questions. Courses emphasize learning skills over coverage of a body of knowledge.
Each IHUM course meets four times per week, twice weekly for 50-minute lectures by Academic Council faculty and twice weekly for 50-minute discussion sections led by post-doctoral fellows. The size of each lecture course varies depending on the number of courses offered with an upper limit of 250 students. The size of each discussion section averages 15 students, with each fellow teaching three sections per quarter.
The number of spaces available in IHUM courses each quarter is roughly equivalent to the number of students in the freshman class ~1650. Enrollment is managed centrally with 90- 98% of students receiving assignment to their first and second choices based on their initial preferences.
The year-long IHUM curriculum includes a one-quarter interdisciplinary and a two-quarter disciplinary sequence. Autumn courses taught by two or three faculty members provide multiple perspectives on three to five primary course texts, which may be written documents, artistic works, cultural artifacts, films and other media. Winter/spring course sequences promote depth of study for students who enroll for the full twenty weeks. Rather than covering basic knowledge in preparation for advanced study in a discipline, winter/spring sequences explore broad issues organized around a central theme and introduce methods of inquiry characteristic of different disciplinary approaches.
The size of faculty/fellow teaching teams ranges from three to eight depending on course size. For continuity and familiarity with IHUM policies and procedures, every team includes at least one experienced IHUM post-doctoral fellow, whether the course is new or continuing.
Faculty and post-doctoral fellows collaborate on development of course policies well in advance of the quarter to ensure team equity for handling late assignments, absences and other similar situations. Weekly team meetings foster close integration of lectures with sections and discussion of the best possible pedagogical approaches to the course material. The Course Coordinator is responsible for convening these meetings as well as for organizing the collaborative design of paper prompts, exams, and other academic tasks such as grade norming. Post-doctoral fellows are fully responsible for grading student work; faculty involvement in students’ grades is limited to participation in a structured grade grievance procedure.
Every team also has a Technology Coordinator, one of the post-doctoral fellows who is especially trained to handle lecture hall arrangements (microphones, smart panel use, etc.) as well as CourseWork support for the course.
Autumn courses are designed and taught collaboratively by two or three members of the faculty each of whom gives lectures on all of the texts. Faculty also design the winter/spring sequences collaboratively but the configuration of faculty lectures can vary. Typically, two faculty members design the sequence, and one gives lectures in winter and the other in spring. Also common is for two faculty members to lecture together in both quarters. On occasion, four faculty members collaborate on course design, and two of them give lectures each quarter.