ECCEs and University Requirements - UPDATED

This may not be the most interesting topic to write about but it is a key element of graduation so it’s worth the effort.

If you completed a course (even if you failed the course) at UIS prior to the fall 2007 semester, you are still required to complete the orignal set of university requirements. As you probably know, this means 12 hours of PAC, LSC and/or AST with at least 4 hours in at least 2 of the three areas. The PAC and LSC prefixes will be phased out after the summer schedule, but many of the PACs will continue on as part of traditional program offerings. If you do not complete these requirements this summer, you will still be allowed to take the PACs in their new form to complete your requirements.

If you started with UIS this past fall or the current semester, you will complete ECCE requirements. ECCE is not a course prefix like PAC or LSC or LIS, it is a group of courses that potentially come from all academic programs. This can make it hard for you to identify ECCE courses, but there will be resources to help you. Each semester, the General Education website will provide a semester course list. It will note GenEd courses as well as ECCE courses. In addition to this, I will make sure that the LIS webpage provides a reasonable list of ECCE requirements for each semester.

There are three categories of ECCE courses: US Communities, Global Awareness, and Engagement Experience. To complete the requirement, you must take at least 3 hours from each of these ECCE categories. In addition, you must take 3 hours of ECCE electives (you may pick from any category) and you must take Speakers Series. This is 13 hours.

U.S Communities (3 hours)
Global Awareness (3 hours)
Engagement Experience (3 hours)
ECCE Elective (3 hours)
UNI 301 Speakers Series (1 hour)

ECCE Fuzzy Math -

The ECCE requirements were created with 3-hour classes as the base for all offerings except Speakers Series so, according to the design, a student would need four 3-hour courses and one 1-hour Speakers Series to meet the requirement. As you progress, you will discover that there are also 4-hour ECCE courses (no sooner do you plan than exceptions arise.) If you take a 4-hour ECCE, you can “split” the credits to count under two of the required areas. For example, you might take a 4-hour US Communities course. This will meet the 3-hour requirement for US Communities and give you 1 hour of the 3 hours you need for ECCE elective.

So, while the ideal ECCE scenario is one 3-hour course in each of ECCE categories, one 3-hour ECCE elective, and Speakers Series (5 total classes), it is possible to complete the requirement with different combinations as well. The key factors to remember are: you must have at least 3 hours in each of the three ECCE categories, you must have Speakers Series, and you must have 13 total ECCE hours.

You are allowed to take Speakers Series a second time. Remember this if you end up finding two 4-hour ECCEs since it will help you reach the 13 hour requirement. For example, a 3-hour US Communities, a 4-hour Global Awareness, a 4-hour Engagement Experience and Speakers Series will cover all the ECCE categories and it will give you 2 of the 3 hours of ECCE elective, but this only adds up to 12 hours. Taking Speakers Series in a second time will bring you up thte 13 hour requirement.

If you have questions now, or as you move through your degree, ask me. I realize that this is remarkably complicated, but I’ve worried about it enough that it makes sense to me and I can help.

Have a good week.

UPDATE:

I'm just discovering something about ECCE Electives. You are safe to assume that ECCEs from the three ECCE categories can count as ECCE Electives, but there are classes that have been approved to count as ECCE Electives only. This means, for example, that you can use the list of Engagement Experience ECCEs to select an ECCE elective, but you can't necessarily use the ECCE Elective list to select an Engagement Experience ECCE.