Search

As educational institutions engage in promoting multiculturalism on campuses, it becomes essential to assess the quality and success of those initiatives. In this paper, the plan being implemented at Northern Illinois University to assess multicultural initiatives is described. The plan is to ensure that faculty, staff, and students participate and benefit from multicultural curricular and related program, courses and curricula continue to be multiculturally transformed, multicultural curricular transformation and support program needs are being met, students obtain and demonstrate the necessary multicultural competencies, and the campus is supportive of multicultural initiatives at all levels of the university. The paper describes the range of multicultural initiatives pursued in higher education institutions and the considerations necessary in assessing such initiatives. The plan described in this paper makes use of existing assessment mechanisms and as well as a Jew new ones designed and implemented in several phases. The results and findings from the assessment along with recommendations for improving the initiatives are discussed in this paper. The paper concludes with a discussion on the real challenges of the plan and issues to consider when assessing multicultural initiatives in a higher education institution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting in 1996, the authors, Surya Vanka andJim Budd developed ID-Online, an Asynchronous Learning Network (ALN)for Industrial Design Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.The primary objective of ID-Online was to deliver enhanced designinstruction via asynchronous access to design resources and enhance network-basedcommunication between instructors and students. This paper provides an historicaloverview of the development of ID-Online. It discusses two yearsof development, use and evaluations. It then leads into the authors' recentinitiatives to advance the concept of a developing design community in thedigital realm. The paper concludes with reflections on the benefit, and pedagogicalpros and cons, of the use of asynchronous learning technologies in designeducation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]