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

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Conference

2016 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

New Orleans, Louisiana

Publication Date

June 26, 2016

Start Date

June 26, 2016

End Date

June 29, 2016

ISBN

978-0-692-68565-5

ISSN

2153-5965

Conference Session

First-Year Programs Division Technical Session 4B: Assessing Student Motivation and Student Success

Tagged Division

First-Year Programs

Page Count

13

DOI

10.18260/p.25678

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/25678

Download Count

505

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Paper Authors

biography

Matthew J Jensen Florida Institute of Technology Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-5229-7382

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Dr. Matthew J. Jensen received his bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in 2006. Matthew received his doctorate from Clemson University in 2011 in Mechanical Engineering, focused primarily on automotive control systems and dynamics. During his graduate studies, Matthew was awarded the Department of Mechanical Engineering Endowed Teaching Fellowship. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering and the ProTrack Co-Op Coordinator at Florida Institute of Technology. His research interests include applications in automotive/transportation safety, electro-mechanical systems, data analysis strategies and techniques, dynamic modeling, and engineering education.

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biography

Jessica Ha Florida Institute of Technology

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Jessica Ha, Associate Director of Transfer and Transition Programs, is a staff member in the office of First Year Experience. She is responsible for the design and coordination of the University's first-year seminar and a course for academically at-risk students. Jessica received a bachelor’s degree in English from Rutgers University and a master’s degree in Counseling with a Student Affairs in Higher Education concentration from Montclair State University. She is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in Science Education from Florida Institute of Technology.

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Abstract

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.

Jensen, M. J., & Ha, J. (2016, June), Increasing the Relevance of Shared Course Content through a Student and Academic Affairs Collaboration Paper presented at 2016 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, New Orleans, Louisiana. 10.18260/p.25678

ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2016 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015