The Council on Academic Affairs will add a new course and course revision to next week’s agenda at their meeting Thursday.

The revised course is MUS 4980 A, B, D: Workshop in Music I, II, III and the new course is HIS 3950 History of U.S. Popular Culture.

MUS 4980 is being revised to add an online component.

Marita Gronnvoll, chair of the CAA, said they were going to become a hybrid course, with some online and some face-to-face parts.

One of the executive actions for tomorrow is to add a cultural diversity designation to PHI 2590G Introduction to Ethics Honors and RLS 1290G Introduction to Religious Studies Honors.

“They have always included cultural diversity in the course, but now they just want to be recognized,” Gronnvoll said.

The cultural diversity component will be added in the course catalogue. There will be no changes in their own classes.

“They do stuff in religious beliefs, cultural beliefs, values,” Gronnvoll said. “Racism, sexism stuff like that.”

These courses will be voted on next week.

The other executive action is to remove the writing intensive designation from MAR 4100.

MAR 4100 is a special topics course.

A memorandum from Dean Mayhar Izadi said special topics courses offer a variety and diverse coverage of topics, some of which do not lend themselves to a ‘writing intensive’ designation.

Writing intensive classes focus 30 to 35 percent of the class on writing, and students need to be able to revise at least one paper.

According to the memorandum, having this designation greatly hampers faculty and administrators from offering courses that should not be writing intensive.

“That’s pretty easy,” Gronnvoll said. “They’re just trying to make the course more honest, that this is the way the course is taught, it isn’t writing intensive, it doesn’t make sense for it to be labeled writing intensive.”

Gronnvoll said it would sometimes be writing intensive, and other times it would not be, so they decided to get rid of the term altogether.

James Ochwa-Echel, associate professor and director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Global Diversity and Coordinator of the Africana Studies Program, will be coming to the CAA meeting to give the program review for the Bachelor of Arts in Africana studies.

Different departments are given a list of questions from the CAA before the program based on the standards set by the Illinois Board of Higher Education.

Speakers can present in any way they want.

“(Ochwa-Echel) will do some sort of a presentation where he’ll either answer all of the questions or some of them,” Gronnvoll said.

The CAA meets at 2 p.m. in room 4440 of the Booth Library.

Cassie Buchman can be reached at 581-2812 or cjbuchman@eiu.edu