Success Perspectives

By now I hope you have all heard a bit about the update to the USG General Education Curriculum, now called Core IMPACTS. The Chancellor highlighted it in his most recent communication to faculty, and most especially the connection to the purpose of the Core and helping students understand the essential value of the courses they take.

Core IMPACTS ensures students acquire essential knowledge across a range of disciplines, helping them understand the ways that the world can be known not just in their chosen area, but also preparing them to be able to integrate and synthesize knowledge, and to know when they may need to reach into their “academic toolbox” for a different way of understanding a problem.

A Purpose-first Core

For bachelor’s students, Core IMPACTS represents more than one-third of their degrees, and they are very often the majority of the courses they will encounter in their first year (or more) of college. While we have long focused on Core courses for the content that students engage in, we have often been less forthright about the skills we are building along the way.

While the structure of the Core is largely unchanged, we are asking for a significant change in the way we talk to students – and ourselves – about General Education. The new Core IMPACTS asks faculty teaching Core courses to make explicit both the why – the reason the course has value to the student’s overall learning – and the...

I really, really enjoyed the Momentum Summit Virtual Sessions this year.  These sessions sparked meaningful conversations about the student experience, both inside and outside the classroom. Across several of the sessions a theme emerged: capturing and learning from student voices. I’d like to use this episode as a way to tie some of these threads together with what I had planned to highlight this month, which is Midmester Check-ins.

The Student Experience

The Summit included several sessions that were explicitly centered on the student experience in a range of domains:

» Albany State University’s Midterm Conversations
Focuses on students who face challenges midway through the semester. By understanding their academic and non-academic lives, we can tailor support to their unique needs.

» UNG’s Fostering Belonging
Focuses on what it might take to make commuter and non-traditional students feel a greater sense of belonging.

» UWG’s Common Course Elements
Works to reduce the cognitive load of students while they negotiate the LMS across all of their courses.

This made me think about how much information we collect – formally and informally – about the rhythm of the student experience on campus and the ways in which this cycle impacts their attitudes, motivation, and learning. [Some of you may have already heard me talk about this a bit...

The end of the semester has arrived and with it commencement season and the general celebrations of the traditional end of the academic year.  I was talking with a colleague this week who received texts from a student she had supported this semester. Just after walking across the stage and turning their tassel, the student texted a celebratory “we did it!”

This brief message highlights one individual’s commitment and support of her student, but also the more general way in which student success is the collective achievement of a host of people, some recognized, but many also unseen and unsung.

This year across the System around 48,000 undergraduate students will be awarded their degrees –which translates to a remarkable number of stories of “we did it.”  With that context, I want to take a moment here to extend my appreciation for the work, thought, and care that has gone into making the USG such an exemplary place for our students. Thank you.

Now, a few brief thoughts for the end of term...