Major Elements of Implementation Plan

New Student Seminar

1.      Develop 20 New Student Seminar course sections                             

2.      Each course satisfies an existing general education requirement 

3.      Skills development objectives included in each course

4.      Faculty development opportunities provided for faculty offering seminars

Introduction to College Program

5.      Seminar instructors are also Introduction to College section leaders

6.      All students in a particular Introduction to College section are also enrolled in the same seminar course

Academic Advising

7.      Seminar instructors are also academic advisors for undeclared students

8.      Hire additional academic staff person in advising

9.      Composition instructors serve as advisors for non-declared students in their courses

10.   Advising staff provides workshops and training for advising

General Education Courses

11.  Hire ad hoc instructors to reduce general education course backlog

Internships

12.  Hire academic staff member to provide clearing house for internship opportunities

Other

13.  Two academic staff positions from FAIRNIS recommendations

14.  Develop plan for evaluating the program’s success

Memorandum

May 16, 2001

To:       Provost Howard Cohen

From:    Learning Experience Implementation Drafting Committee

Subject: Recommendations for use of funds

The attached appendices detail the Learning Experience Implementation Drafting Committee’s recommendations for using the initial Learning Experience funds. This memo explains our reasoning in selecting projects to be funded, and briefly describes how we envision those projects.

In creating our plans, we assumed UW-Green Bay would receive $250,000 in Learning Experience funds for the 2001-2002 school year and $500,000 in Learning Experience funds for the 2002-2003 school year.

UW-Green Bay originally presented the Learning Experience proposal as a plan to increase student retention, and our students’ initial experiences at UW-Green Bay are surely crucial to any effort to increase retention. Thus, the committee gave high priority to the following:

• The High Impact Student Contact initiative, and in particular the New Student Seminars;
• Academic Advising, especially for first-year students and those who have not yet selected a major;
• Reducing the “backlog” in certain General Education classes, and ideally reducing class size in certain General Education classes, by increasing the number of Gen Ed sections offered.

The committee also gave priority to these items:

• Funding additional Academic Staff positions, as called for by the FAIRNIS report;
• Supporting the Professional Practice initiative from the Learning Experience plan, and specifically the idea of encouraging students to take part in internships;
• Making certain that sufficient faculty and staff development opportunities are available to those responsible for implementing the New Student Seminars and for upgrading advising for first-year students.

The committee anticipates that in the first year (2001-2002), Learning Experience activities would largely center on course development, preparation, and faculty development:

• The New Student Seminars should not result in an increase in the General Education requirements for UW-Green Bay students; thus, each New Student Seminar should satisfy one of the existing General Education requirements. Which General Education requirement a given section of the seminar satisfied would, of course, depend on the academic content of that particular section. All instructors presenting proposals for New Student Seminars would be required to specify which General Education requirement their particular seminar would satisfy, and to provide an explanation of how their particular seminar would fit that General Education requirement.

• Proposals for New Student Seminar courses will be due during the Fall 2001 semester, with decisions by semester’s end as to which courses are approved. The instructors for the approved courses will each receive a $3500 stipend to participate in course development and in faculty development workshops, with the faculty development beginning perhaps as early as January 2002 and continuing well into the summer. Faculty development sessions may at times focus on such topics as facilitating discussion in seminars. Nevertheless, perhaps the most important point to be emphasized during development sessions is that beyond the specific academic content of any given section, the course has major objectives in general-skills areas such as reading, writing, researching, and critical thinking, as well as in socialization to the university. Each teacher must specify how he or she will use course content as a vehicle to lead students toward these more general objectives, rather than letting course content become so dominant that the seminars are indistinguishable from other Gen-Ed courses.

• Instructors of New Student Seminars must also agree to be section leaders for Intro to College, with the students in any given teacher’s Intro to College section being the same students he or she will teach in the New Student Seminar. The instructors of New Student Seminars must also agree to be academic advisors for their NSS students for at least those students’ first year of college, and perhaps for their first two years. The instructors will receive a three-credit reassignment for this Intro to College and advising work, so that the package of teaching a three-credit New Student Seminar, teaching Intro to College, and advising the NSS students for at least their first year, will count as six credits toward the instructor’s teaching load. Thus, the faculty development program for NSS instructors will at times focus on academic advising, particularly advising students who have not yet selected a major and who are largely focusing on General Education requirements. Ideally, faculty development workshops focusing on advising could be run by members of the Academic Advising staff, thus encouraging faculty advisors and Academic Advising staff members to work more closely with one another in the future.  Eventually, once the New Student Seminars become widely available—and required—so that nearly all students take a New Student Seminar during their first semester of school here, these seminars will be the “default mode” place where new students acquire an academic advisor who knows them personally.

• But because it will be some years before the New Student Seminars are available to/required of all incoming students, and because access to academic advisors is a major problem for first-year students now, the committee recommends several actions designed to improve advising for first-year students immediately. First, the committee recommends that one of the FAIRNIS hires in the first year of Learning Experience funds be an additional academic advisor. Second, because most incoming students take English composition during their first semester at UW-Green Bay, the committee recommends that for each English composition class taken mainly by new students, the teacher be paid a stipend equal to one-third the ad hoc rate for a three-credit composition class, in exchange for which the composition teacher will serve as advisor for his or her students who have not yet declared a major. This plan—which asks composition teachers to play a role similar to the one they played in the CONNECT program a few years ago—is admittedly somewhat stopgap, designed to serve only until enough New Student Seminars are available. But in the meantime, composition seems the logical place to start such a program, since English composition is the one small-enrollment, high-personal-contact course most new students take during their first semester at UW-Green Bay.

• Advising workshops must be available for the composition teachers, as well as for teachers in those academic units which have had the most difficulty meeting the demand for advising in their area. Here, too, ideally Academic Advising staff could be workshop facilitators, in part to encourage teachers and Academic Advising staff to work together more closely on advising issues in the future.

• The committee recommends that the remaining Learning Experience funds for 2001-2002 be devoted to hiring ad hoc instructors to reduce the backlog in enrollment in certain Gen Ed courses and to hiring another academic staff person from the FAIRNIS recommendations

• Although it is not a budget item, the committee recommends that during the first year of Learning Experience funding, work begins on creating a plan for evaluating the program’s success. Presumably, Debbie Furlong and/or Lucy Arendt will work with the first New Student Seminar teachers to develop such a plan.

During the second year (2002-2003), the first New Student Seminars will take place. The committee projects 20 sections of the seminar, each capped at 20 students, during Fall 2002. Thus, the seminars (and their concomitant advising) will be available to 400 of the roughly 1,000 new students at UW-Green Bay that fall. Other highlights of the second-year plan, as envisioned by the committee:

• Twenty sections to be covered by ad hoc instructors must be allocated from Learning Experience funds to compensate for the three-credit reassignments the twenty New Student Seminar teachers will receive for advising and Intro to College work.

• Funds should be available for further development of the initial group of New Student Seminar teachers, as well as for development of those teachers new to the program, with a goal of offering thirty sections of New Student Seminars during the Fall 2003 semester.

• Three new faculty members funded via Learning Experience money will begin working at UW-Green Bay during the Fall 2002 semester, having been recruited through searches during the 2001-2002 school year. While the new faculty members need not teach exclusively General Education courses, any upper-division courses they teach in the majors should be offset by reconfiguring other department members’ teaching schedules to increase the number of sections of General Education courses offered. Thus, the net result of the hires should be an increase exclusively in sections of General Education courses offered, not an increase in offerings within the majors.

• In order to facilitate the internship program for upper-division students, the committee recommends hiring an Academic Staff member in charge of coordinating internships, with all university-wide resources for internships centralized in a single office run by this newly hired employee. The newly hired employee will not be the primary person arranging the internships, but instead will be a resource person and the “default mode” initial contact for those interested in internships but uncertain whom to contact first. For example, an employer within the community who is interested in working with student interns but who doesn’t know which faculty members work with interns in the employer’s area might contact the Academic Staff person, who would steer the employer to the proper faculty member; a faculty member wishing to arrange internships for certain students but unaware of the procedures for doing so might contact the Academic Staff person, who would help the faculty member to complete the necessary forms and to contact the appropriate employers in the community; and a student seeking an internship but uncertain of which faculty member or employer to contact might begin with the Academic Staff person, who would arrange for the student to talk with the appropriate faculty members and with appropriate employers. The Academic Staff person would also be responsible for maintaining a repository of information related to the internship program, informally publicizing the internship program, etc. But the internships themselves would still be arranged among cooperating faculty members, community employers, and students.

Finally, we should point out two difficulties:

• While the 2002-2003 funds for ad hocs will cover the sections which would otherwise have been lost through the three-credit reassignments New Student Seminar teachers will receive for advising and for Intro to College work, there will still be a loss of available slots for General Education courses as a result of taking teachers from relatively large-enrollment Gen Ed courses and placing them in New Student Seminars capped at twenty students. (Alternatively, there may be a loss of offerings in the majors if the NSS instructors are taken from upper-division courses in the major in order to teach the seminars.) The Leadership Team may wish to revise our recommendations in such a way as to avoid this net loss of available slots for General Education classes, and perhaps for some classes in the majors.

• Fairly soon, UW-Green Bay needs to reconsider its entire General Education program. Thus, when new faculty members are hired with Learning Experience funds, and with the avowed goal of increasing General Education offerings, the search and screen committees will need to keep abreast of possible plans for reconsidering the General Education program. We should avoid hiring candidates to fit a General Education template which will soon be obsolete.

Appendix A—Cost Estimates

2001-2002--$250,000

1. a. $3500 stipend for each of twenty New Student Seminar teachers            $70,000

         for course development and participation in training sessions

     b. Costs of hiring workshop facilitators, purchasing books, etc.                  $10,000

     c. Savings from Intro to College budget because teaching Intro to             ($11,000)

         College will be part of requirement for New Student Seminar

         teachers

2. Academic Advisor—FAIRNIS—salary + fringe benefits                           $45,000

3. Stipends for composition teachers @ $933/class for 36 classes                  $33,588

    during Fall 2001 semester

4. Advising workshops and training                                                               $  1,000

5. Hiring ad hoc instructors to reduce/eliminate backlog in enrollment             $60,000

    for certain General Education courses

6. Another Academic Staff position from FAIRNIS report                           $41,412

    Total                                                                                                        $250,000

(Note: We also believe work should begin on evaluation of the program’s success, but we believe this will not be a budget item, as it will probably be part of the regular job duties for Debbie Furlong and/or Lucy Arendt.)  

Appendix B—Cost Estimates

2002-2003--$500,000

1. a. $1500 stipend for each of thirty New Student Seminar teachers—          $45,000

        returning NSS teachers as well as first-timers—for course

        (re)development and (re)training

     b. Hiring workshop facilitators, purchasing books, etc.                               $10,000

     c. Savings from Intro to College Budget because teaching Intro                 ($11,000)

         to College will be part of requirement for New Student Seminar

         teachers

2. Academic Advisor—FAIRNIS—salary + fringe benefits                            $45,000

3. Stipends for composition teachers at $967/class for 22 classes                   $21,274

   (THIS ASSUMES A 3.6% RAISE, BUT IT ALSO ASSUMES

    THAT STUDENTS TAKING NEW STUDENT SEMINARS

    WILL BE GROUPED INTO THEIR OWN ENGLISH

     COMPOSITION CLASSES, CLASSES WHERE THE TEACHERS

     WON’T NEED TO ADVISE AND WON’T RECEIVE STIPENDS)

4. Advising workshops and training                                                               $ 1,000

5. Academic Staff position from FAIRNIS—hired previous year                  $41,412

6. Ad hoc funds to cover twenty sections for reassignments of New             $80,000

    Student Seminar teachers @ average of $4,000/three-credit class

7. Academic Staff position to coordinate internships                                     $46,000

8. Three new faculty positions                                                                      $180,000

9. New FAIRNIS Position(s)                                                                      $  41,314

Total                                                                                                           $500,000