Enhancing the First Year Experience

Enhancing the First Year Experience (FYE) learning community is designed to assist faculty in the integration of WebCT technology into the newly formed student learning communities linking First Year Seminar (FYSE 101) courses and First Year College Life and Leadership Labs (FYSE 102). The goal is to increase student engagement and satisfaction in the courses through deeper integration of content. A secondary goal is increased freshman retention.

The FYE-LC has two specific learning needs and goals. First, the group needs instruction in how to use WebCT. The goal is to be able to develop technical comfort in order to navigate WebCT easily and to teach students to use it. Second, the group needs faculty development on how to use technology to more effectively integrate material between courses in a student learning community and how to increase student engagement through technology. The goal is to enhance students’ engagement in the course with innovative teaching methods through the use of WebCT and to heighten student’s appreciation of the relevancy of the FYSE 102 course content by linking it to FYSE 101.

In order to meet these two goals the group will participate in a two-day summer workshop to receive in-depth instruction in WebCT from Instructional Technologist, Laura Little. An outside expert in learning community pedagogy will be brought in as well to help faculty develop pedagogy for integrating course content and increasing student engagement. In addition, the learning community expert brought in for the workshop will be charged with introducing the group to well-researched and grounded learning principles, pedagogies and teaching strategies that can be integrated in the reVision. The group will lead a Faculty Forum for the college in the Spring semester to share what they have learned.The outcomes of this project will also be shared statewide at the OLN Southeast Regional Center learning institute and the OLN Learning Communities Expo.

Click here to download the Portrait of Practice (pdf).

OLN Southeast Regional Center at Shawnee State University in Partnership with the Teaching and Learning Center 940 Second St., Portsmouth, OH 45662 (740) 351-3334