INCREASING FYS QUALITY THROUGH GREATER CURRICULAR FLEXIBILITY Daniel B. Friedman, Director, University 101 Programs Sandy Greene, Program Coordinator, University 101 Programs University of South Carolina The University of South Carolina’s hallmark first-year seminar, University 101 (UNIV 101), is an extended orientation course that strives to help new students successfully transition to college, academically and personally. In Fall 2018, 4,500 students were enrolled in 245 sections, taught by 223 instructors. With a course offering of this size, it is critical to strike the appropriate balance between consistency across sections and flexibility for instructors. In their classic work on college curriculum development, Stark and Lattuca (1997) suggested that course curricula or academic plans contain several elements, including the purpose, content, sequence, instructional processes, instructional resources, and evaluation, as well as the ability to adjust the plan. When navigating multiple section offerings of a first-year seminar, a key decision academic leaders have to make is how much flexibility to give instructors in these areas within their courses. Some first-year seminars use a standard syllabus for all sections that prescribes not only the outcomes to be achieved, but also the topics to be covered, when they are to be covered, and the assignments to measure what is learned. While our university wants students to have a consistent experience across sections, we recognize the limitations of overly prescribing an academic plan. Though greater restrictions may yield consistency, they may also result in a student experience that is consistently average. In an effort to push classes past average and toward exceptional, we favor flexibility for instructors over consistency across sections. The course has three broad goals with 10 learning outcomes (see Figure 1). Each section has an enrollment limit of 19 students and is co-taught by a faculty or staff member and an upper-division peer leader. While instructors must develop their course around the same 10 learning outcomes, they can select their own content, sequencing, and assignments, as long as they meet those outcomes. We do use a common textbook to help apply some degree of consistency, but instructors can choose the chapters most relevant for their course design and student needs. This approach has proven successful, as improvements on overall course effectiveness over time indicate (see Figure 1). This construct, from the FirstYear Seminar Assessment, a national benchmarking instrument, evaluates the degree that students report the course (a) included interesting subject matter, (b) contributed to their ability to succeed academically, (c) contributed to their ability
The content, topics, and methods used to achieve outcomes should be tailored to the needs of the students in a given section and to the strengths and expertise of the instructor. With such a large enrollment, one size will not fit all.
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