Increasing the Relevance of Shared Course Content through a Student and Academic Affairs Collaboration

摘要

This evidence-based practice paper describes the collaborative effort between Student and Academic Affairs at a small, private, technological institution. First-year introductory engineering courses have become commonplace for engineering programs of all types. Typically, these courses are taught by the engineering departments and used to improve engineering student retention and/or help undecided students choose a branch of engineering as their major of study. Tangentially, many universities have developed a first-year student seminar course to aide students in the transition to the university's learning environment. These courses are delivered in a wide variety of formats, and the process and criteria for selecting instructors differs from school to school. As different as they may be, the underlying purpose of a first-year seminar is to introduce new students to topic areas that promote student success in the first year, thereby improving first-year student retention. At Florida Institute of Technology, all students are required to take University Experience, a one-credit first-year seminar. Likewise, undecided freshman-engineering students are required to take Introduction to Engineering, a broad three-credit first-year engineering course as part of the General Engineering program. In Fall 2015, the Introduction to Engineering students were grouped as a cohort and were registered for the same section of University Experience. By grouping the students together, the instructors of both courses were able to collaborate on topics and assignments, and jointly develop materials. The goal of this collaboration was to help students realize that many of the concepts learned about and discussed in one course are relevant outside of that particular class, and in particular, that much of the information taught in those two courses are related. By covering the same topics in both courses, it is proposed that students will better be able to see the relevance and the relationship between student success and their engineering education, improving the net benefit of these individual courses.