You have /5 articles left.
Sign up for a free account or log in.
How should student success courses be different this fall?
I mean this as an honest question, without agenda or snark.
Many colleges, including my own, have student success courses aimed at new students. The courses go by many different names, and they vary considerably by context: sometimes they’re mandatory, sometimes they’re “strongly recommended” or default settings, and sometimes they’re electives. Sometimes they’re combined with meta majors. I’ve seen their content range from scavenger hunts to study skills to self-awareness, and their size range from one credit to three. There’s less of an industry standard understanding of them than there is around, say, Intro to Sociology.
Having said all of that, they were designed around colleges, and colleges’ forms have been relatively steady for a while. Now, abruptly, colleges are very different. Most of us don’t have a clear picture of what the fall semester -- or the next year, for that matter -- will look like, but it will probably be notably different from last fall. And students coming in from high school will be coming off a year that was truncated in basic ways.
The student experience has certainly changed since March. Their lives (and everyone else’s) have become more stressful, with economic anxiety and concerns for the health of family and friends weighing more heavily than before. McSweeney’s teacher evaluation form may have exaggerated slightly -- “extent to which instructor kept existential terror simmering below the surface” -- but it’s recognizable.
And in many cases, the way that classes run has changed. If we go with a greater proportion of hybrid and/or remote live classes, students will need to be able to navigate those successfully. (Scavenger hunts may also be less relevant.) Internships have started to take different forms, and the search process may have to change along with them.
So, my question for the folks who design those classes: How will they change this fall?
