First-Year Seminar: Using Technology to Explore Professional Issues and Opportunities Across Locations

Introduction

Figure 1.

College of Agricultural Sciences’ AG 150 Be A Master Student! Web site.

First-year seminars are designed to support the transition of entering students into the university environment. Yet, students are diverse; they enter college with varying levels of skills and abilities. Therefore, within the context of an institution’s mission and culture, the first-year seminar serves as a key element around which students may structure a quality educational experience. The seminar can serve as a student’s initial step toward developing cognitive skills: “to reason critically, communicate clearly, or solve problems” (Ratcliff, 1997). The seminar provides an opportunity for focused, directed learning for students at the beginning of their undergraduate experiences.

Although first-year seminars vary across universities and disciplines, their common purpose is to support the incoming students’ transition into the university’s academic, social, and cultural environment. A national survey of first-year seminar programs (Barefoot & Fidler, 1996) found that academic skills, orientation to campus resources and programs, study skills, increased faculty-student interactions, life skills and wellness issues, as well as communications skills and career exploration are common topics for such seminars. Improving academic success and student retention are two key expectations for first-year seminars (Fidler & Hunter, 1989). Evaluating a first-year seminar for business students, Lamb (1997) determined that the majority of students enrolled in the seminar performed better academically than those who did not enroll.

Many students share similar educational interests and goals. First-year seminars are used to introduce these students to the breadth of knowledge, issues, and opportunities across their common interest areas, independent of major fields of study or professional requirements. Addressing the interdependencies of knowledge across disciplines is an aspect of learning that disciplinary courses traditionally overlook. To accomplish such value-added education (Thomson, 1992), one strategy is to explore issues and opportunities within the disciplines and majors of the involved colleges.

The intent of this project was to identify resources, develop the best educational practices, and then integrate appropriate communications technology into the first-year seminar of the College of Agricultural Sciences, Be a Master Student! (AG 150), to enhance the seminar’s agricultural sciences component. Offered as an elective two-credit course to entering freshmen, the seminar focuses on (a) facilitating each student’s transition to the University community and (b) increasing each student’s understanding of the scope, issues, and opportunities in the agricultural sciences. The agricultural sciences component of AG 150 is, of course, unique to the College. However, no common core of resources in the agricultural sciences generally or applicable to Penn State specifically was available for either students or instructors. Integrating appropriate communications technology into the seminar’s curriculum would address this issue.

Issues Identified

As colleges seek to accomodate most, if not all, of their entering students, the disciplinary focus of such seminars can be as diverse as the faculty involved. Involving full-time faculty as instructors is another hallmark of first-year seminars. Given the diversity of faculty involved, the need exists to define and develop shared educational objectives for all seminars. One way to support these objectives is through access to a common core of resources.

The College views the first-year seminar as a key to retaining students in the food and agricultural sciences because exploring relevant issues and career opportunities is important in such seminars. However, given the diverse disciplinary foci of the teaching faculty, instructors will not be equally well versed in these issues or opportunities. In addition, college resources and programs are primarily based at Penn State’s University Park campus. Even for those students on that campus, the constraints of time or location or both mean tours of College research-extension programs and facilities are often not feasible and graphic descriptions are not always satisfactory. Consequently, students have limited, if any, opportunities to become familiar with these programs and facilities on-site.

As a result of a change in admission policies beginning fall 1996, increasing numbers...