The Office of General Education, in partnership with the Cary M. Maguire Center for Ethics and Public Responsibility, is embracing innovation to help students complete their Common Curriculum (CC) requirements more efficiently, by using artificial intelligence to analyze 6,807 active SMU courses and identify those that may align with the Philosophical, Religious, and Ethical Inquiry (PREI) or Civic and Individual Ethics (CIE) requirements.
Using the National Ethics Project’s Ethics Course ID Tool, we uploaded SMU’s course catalog data, which included titles and descriptions.
As described on their website, “The Ethics Course ID Tool is a valuable resource for colleges and universities seeking to identify ethics-related courses. With just a simple upload of course catalogs, users receive scored outputs that indicate the likelihood of a course being ethics-related. Developed through a combination of expert knowledge and advanced natural language processing techniques, the ECIT has been rigorously validated through empirical studies involving experts in ethics education. By utilizing the ECIT, institutions interested in enhancing ethics education can facilitate integration of ethics across the curriculum.”
This AI tool generated applicability scores, helping us pinpoint 80 SMU courses that naturally fit these areas but don’t yet carry a CC designation.
Our Course Outreach list indicates which course instructors and departments we have reached out to. Academic departments can find detailed instructions on our Course & Experience Proposal webpage. Please refer to the Council on General Education website for any upcoming proposal deadlines.
Together, we can make it easier for students to meet general education requirements while recognizing the excellent learning experiences already taking place in SMU courses.
For any questions, please do not hesitate to contact our office.
