Each year, departments add, update and, occasionally, discontinue academic programs in our ongoing efforts to ensure that we provide our students with the most relevant educational offerings. This year we have made several enhancements to the graduate and undergraduate curriculum, as well as to our online offerings.
I am pleased to announce the following changes to the UC Santa Cruz curriculum this academic year:
- The Social Documentation M.F.A. degree program was established in the Film and Digital Media Department (FDM). The program will develop in students the skills necessary to become leaders in the production of documentary media that advances social justice.
- The Science Education B.S. has been approved. This program will provide students with broad training in the physical and biology sciences in order to prepare them for careers teaching science in California high schools. The program is designed to consolidate several existing science education programs on campus.
- With the approval of the Science Education B.S., both the Bio-Education Concentration and Physics Education B.S. were discontinued.
- The Department of Languages and Applied Linguistics established a B.A. in Applied Linguistics and Multilingualism. The program will train students to understand the workings of the human mind and human behavior through the study of sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, functional grammar, language acquisition, and foreign language pedagogy.
- The campus has established an M.S. and Ph.D. in Computational Media. These innovative degree programs will prepare graduates to take leading roles in the burgeoning field of computational media—a field for which California is a major hub.
Faculty have also been active in developing and launching fully online courses.
This summer, faculty will offer 20 different courses online, allowing students to enroll from anywhere in the world where there is internet access. In the past year, the campus increased its offering of free online courses on Coursera from two to six, adding new courses on statistics, programming in C++, and on the natural acquisition of literacy
This summer will see the launch of two new online courses: Professor Erika Zavaleta’s popular course on the ecosystems of California, and a timely course from Professor Emeritus Peter Kenez on Russian history.
