curriculum change at Saskatchewan

[Moira Day]

We are in the middle of completing a self-study report at the University
of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, and I would like to ask our membership for
feedback on two questions that arose during our meeting.
 
(1) It was suggested that we look into the possibility of developing
portfolio courses, but none of us has any experience with this.  Can
anyone give us information based on their own experience with them, or
refer us to sources where we can get more information on their format and
implementation.
 
(2) At the moment, we have a large (75)general drama course for non drama
majors at the 100 level where they can pick up a fine art credit, and our
majors take 100 level courses in design and acting. It has been suggested
by our external examiners that we replace the design and acting courses
with a large general course for drama majors at the 100 level, and that
would free faculty to concentrate their energies more on the senior
courses. The major difficulty we have is that we're a small Department (6
faculty), and most of the successful omnibus courses we're personally
aware are done in large Departments which have a fairly large pool of
sessionals and graduate students to draw on to teach or at least lead
tutorials at that level.  We lack those kind of resources ourselves and
are not sure without them how we would in fact be saving work for
ourselves. We would like to hear from smaller Departments (about our size
or smaller) who have encountered the same difficulty and how they have
handled it, or from anyone else who could shed some light on the problem
from the basis of their own experience or anyone else's.
        We will be discussing these matters at a 2 day Department retreat
at the end of March, and would very much appreciate whatever feedback our
colleagues could give us on this.
        Thanks.
Moira Day
University of Saskatchewan