Follow the links below to the 2003-04 Cal Poly Plan Initiatives annual reports.

• General Education and Support Courses
  • College of Liberal Arts
  • College of Science and Mathematics
• Information Technology Services
• Robert E. Kennedy Library

General Education (GE) and Support Courses

College of Liberal Arts (CLA)   Top

During the 2003-04 academic year, the College of Liberal Arts was provided $300,000 from the Cal Poly Plan to help fund GE offerings. Half of the amount was new money, the other half was a continuation of the amount provided for the same purpose in 2002-03.

Cuts in state funding to the university and college eliminated approximately 18 positions in CLA between 2002-03 and 2003-04. The college used college-based fees to backfill many of these positions last year, but, for obvious reasons, college-based fees generally support major rather than GE courses. CLA used the $300,000 for three purposes: 1) to maintain GE English offerings in areas A and C, 2) to main GE Speech Communication offerings in areas A2 and A3, and 3) to support two more jumbo humanities classes in C4. so half of the money was spent on purchasing sections of Areas A and C courses just as it had been the year before. The new half of the money was used to replace English and SCOM GE sections that would have been lost due to the cost and to help staff the humanities classes (serving 400+ students in C4).

Comparison figures for the two years:

Year	#SCOM GE Sections (A2 and A3)	#English GE Sections (A and C)
2002-03	162	326
2003-04	161	327*
* Plus 2 additional jumbo C4 sections in humanities. In spring 2004, CLA also substituted a few small sections of C1 for one jumbo section as proposed in its formal request to the Steering Committee for new money.

College of Science and Mathematics (CSM)    Top

The $1,050,000 in Cal Poly Plan funding for CSM made a tremendous difference in the ability to offer classes to Cal Poly students. This support was absolutely critical to the delivery of the GE and support curriculum in 2003-04. With out it we would have not been able to utilized our part-time Lecturers and Teaching Associates to the fullest extent. This allocation was sufficient to support the equivalent of more than 200 four-unit lecture courses or more than 400 laboratory sections. It was estimated that there would have been 20% fewer student credit units generated in CSM if this resource were not available. Instead CSM taught 55,741 or almost the assigned target.

Information Technology Services   Top

GOAL: Utilizing Cal Poly Plan funding, each year determine key deliverables based on priorities at the time that augment, accelerate and enhance infrastructure support for Student Success Initiatives and report on accomplishments in a responsible fashion.

STRATEGY: Fund a System Administrator position that represents one of 2.3 staff positions required to deliver more, sooner and better. The position will augment ITS support for Student Success Initiatives by improving the infrastructure that will:

• Facilitate Student Success through enhanced support for implementation of projects such as Degree Works
• Augment support for the creation of a self-service data model that enables Department, College and University decision makers to determine an appropriate course of action based on information deployed through PolyData, the Cal Poly data warehouse
• Leverage portal technology to make information available in a concise and targeted format
• Enhance support for learning management systems such as Blackboard
• Accelerate the build-out of a fault tolerant development, test and production environment
• Improve backup and recovery processes for critical student data

Tasks identified to meet strategy and status of deliverables:

Enhanced Data Warehouse Support

Augmented DegreeWorks Support

Enhanced Portal Support

Infrastructure Upgrades

Robert E. Kennedy Library   Top

The $150,000 allocation of Cal Poly Plan funds enabled the Library to maintain core level infrastructure, services and resources that potentially benefit all Cal Poly student s and faculty. General and specific deliverables and service include:

• Extended library hours
• Investments in digital collections
• Enhancement of online catalog access
• Support Digital Teaching Library/Learning Commons