Some recommendations from the ISUComm plan for revamping English 104 and 105 cannot be put into effect at the present time because of budget constraints, said Michael Mendelson, director of ISUComm and professor in English.

ISUComm is a curricular plan resulting from a Faculty Senate task force that studied the English proficiency requirement. The plan reformed curricula for foundation English courses — English 104 and English 105 — to focus on forms of communication other than writing through WOVE, an acronym for written, oral, visual and electronic communication.

After proposing the new ISUComm curricular plan in spring 2002, ISUComm considered funding options. Because of budget cuts, available resources were not enough to support all aspects of the plan, so ISUComm proceeded with what initiatives it could, Mendelson said.

Implementation of recommendations shouldn’t require high costs, said Sanjeev Agarwal, Faculty Senate president.

“I don’t think there is an enormous amount of money needed to change 104/105 to incorporate the new curriculum,” Agarwal said.

The cost of implementing the recommendations comes primarily in personnel power and time, Mendelson said. Costs come from professional development workshops to prepare faculty to teach ISUComm foundation courses and in reviewing progress to improve future sections, he said.

The provost’s office allocated funds to incorporate the changes in English 104 and 105, as well as consulting services for departments outside of English that want to add ISUComm to the curriculum, Agarwal said.

Consultants are available for departments seeking to integrate WOVE into upper-level courses at no cost. The consultants are ISU faculty members in English, communication studies and art and design, Mendelson said. Funding for consultants will come from the $105,000 ISUComm budget.

Internal funding within colleges has already been directed at incorporating additional communication skills into curricula, Agarwal said. Several departments and colleges have added, or are in the process of adding, more forms of communication to their course work, he said.

“It will be up to departments to decide how much communication skills they want to incorporate into their departments and how much they want to depend on the English department,” he said.

Two recommendations will not be implemented. One called for eliminating the test-out process to require all students to take both 104 and 105. Presently, about half of incoming freshmen test out of English 104.

If Iowa State were to end the test-out process, budget and scheduling problems would arise from creating new sections of English 104, Mendelson said. The placement policy and class sizes will remain the same for now, he said.

ISUComm’s plan also suggested a reduction in class size for foundation English courses from 26 students per section to the peer institution average of 22 students, Mendelson said. Doing so would cost thousands of dollars, which isn’t feasible in the current fiscal climate, he said.