First Year Experience Learning Modules

Abstract

The First-Year Experience (FYE) is programming at colleges and universities that is designed to help students with the transition from high school to post-secondary education. The gold standard of FYE programming is the First-Year Seminar, a credit course taken in the first semester of college or university. These courses are designed to help students explore learning skills, life skills and study skills, reflect on their own practice and put into place and monitor plans for future success. Such courses are prevalent at many American colleges and universities but are not common in Ontario. Alternative models of delivery are needed.

We have designed 15 standalone learning modules on a variety of learning skills, life skills and study skills. These courses are built using the H5P Studio and can be easily integrated into your first-year course. They have been designed by a team from Mathematics and Statistics departments from three Ontario universities, so they will occasionally have a mathematical flavour, but they are still appropriate for a wide audience. Some modules may need minor edits, but the modules are open source and may be adapted subject to the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

The modules are grouped by Martin and Marsh's 5C Model of Academic Buoyancy as follows: 1. Confidence (Values Affirmation, Growth Mindsets)--2. Coordination (Effective Study Sessions, Professional Communication)--3. Control (Learning by Teaching, Chunking, Exercise Solving, Spaced Retrieval)--4. Composure (Managing Academic Stress, Managing Perfectionism, Test)--5. Writing Strategies, Academic Honesty)--6. Commitment (Procrastination, Staying on Task)

Each module can be incorporated two different ways into your course: Option 1: The modules are strictly participation-based. Each module has completion trackers and interactive components that must be completed by the student. The H5P modules then return these completion metrics to most Learning Management Software.

Option 2: The modules have a manually graded component. Each module contains an opportunity for students to write a reflection or set goals. These submissions can be exported by the student for submission as part of an assignment or as part of a participation component of your course.

Our trials with these modules have found that our preferred educational design is to make all 15 modules available for the entire semester and allow the students to choose up to 5 to complete, each worth 1% of their final grade. We have also used a combination of Option 1 and Option 2 above. It may also be the case that you wish to use a single module as part of your course or as part of an assignment. You are encouraged to edit and adapt these modules to suit your preferred course design!

If you have any comments or suggestions, please don't hesitate to reach out to Andrew Skelton at askelton@yorku.ca.

These modules are Version 1.0 - there are still many improvements to come!