To fulfill their general education credits, the university requires students to complete a sequence of communication courses that are designed to help them achieve proficiency in both written and oral communication.

There are three levels of the curriculum in the general education communication sequence: Communications Literacy 1 (CL1), Communications Literacy 2 (CL2), and two Communications Intensive (CI) courses. This is an intentional sequence of courses; each is meant to follow and build upon the course that came before it.

CL1 and CL2 (lower-division) courses focus on foundational communication skills that are portable across disciplines and audiences and foundational information literacy skills. Given these goals, CL courses are not major-specific or tied to disciplinary-specific modes of communication.

CI (upper-division) courses focus on communication within a discipline with a strong emphasis in both written and oral communication, and so tend to focus more narrowly on disciplinary audiences and conventions. Given these goals, ideally the CI courses will be built into a student’s major.

The outcomes for courses with a CL1 and CL2 designation, like English 1010 and English 2010, can be found on the General Education website.

Communication Literacy (CL1 & CL2) Assessment Requirement

Because English 1010 and 2010 fulfill General Education requirements, instructors of these courses (including GIs) are required to include assessment of CL outcomes as part of their curriculum.

To do this, you will need to assess students twice throughout the semester, once toward the beginning and once toward the end.

To provide the university access to your assessment data, attach the university-generated CL learning outcomes to two of your major assessment rubrics. Instructions for doing this are found in the section below.

Adding CL Outcomes to Assignment Rubrics

The CL1 & CL2 assessment rubrics are already integrated (i.e., pre-loaded) into Canvas. However, each semester you will need to attach these CL1 or CL2 rubrics to two of your existing assignment rubrics (for the two assignments you have selected to use for the General Education assessment). Attaching the CL1 or CL2 rubric to your current rubric allows you to easily mark students’ progress using Speed Grader in Canvas—and allows the University to collect the necessary assessment data for accreditation.

To attach the CL1 or CL2 rubric to an early assignment (ideally the first major assignment) and a later assignment (ideally your final major assignment), follow these instructions:

• In your Canvas course, click on the Assignments tab and the click on the assignment name.
• Locate your rubric at the bottom of the assignment page.
• Select the edit rubric icon (the pencil in the top right corner of the rubric). This should open the rubric for edits. (If you don’t currently have a rubric attached to the assignment, select the + Rubric button at the bottom of the page to make a rubric and follow the same instructions below.)
• Scroll to the bottom of the rubric and click Find Outcome (it has an icon with a magnifying glass next to it). This should bring up a new dialog box that will have CL1 or CL2 (with a target icon next to it) in the top left corner.
• Select CL1 or CL2 in the top left corner. This should bring up the rubric for the assessment.
• Deselect the box labelled “Use this criterion for scoring.” Deselecting the box will ensure that the criterion won’t impact the scoring of the rubric (so, the three points of that criterion won’t be calculated into the student’s grade).
• Select Import in the bottom right corner. This should import the criterion into your existing rubric. The dialog box should disappear after the import and you should see the rubric again with the criterion imported.
• Select Update Rubric. Your changes should be saved!

Assessing the CL1 Outcomes

When you grade the assignment, mark the gen ed assessment portion of the rubric, and this will automatically record your assessment for the university.

If students need accommodations, direct them to DRC or Office of Equity.