After seeing improvements both in course-level data and anecdotally from professors involved in a Faculty Learning community between associate-granting and bachelor-granting partners, a discussion began about how to adapt this process to establish partnerships with other state institutions.
We, in conjunction with S-STEM CONNECT, organized a two-day curriculum retreat for this purpose to take place The Leadership Center in Aurora, NE (https://tlcaurora.org/). We invited all state associate-granting institutions to send two representatives to take part in the retreat, as well as invited colleagues from an additional state university to support participants in making connections with colleagues from multiple institutions. In total, we had seven representing institutions. The retreat gave us the opportunity to strengthen our current partnership efforts, as well as test the viability of this process in supporting new partnerships.
Organization
The format of the retreat was modeled after the process that the original group of faculty followed once they began meeting together. We hoped that it would largely serve as a speed-line, which in real-time took around a year to get up and running. In addition to this, we hoped it would provide starting points/introductions for schools with which we did not have as much contact. It served as a retreat for people within computer science, mathematics, and data science.
Importantly, the retreat was co-organized by those involved in the original partnership, to help ensure that the retreat was a truly collaborative and representative endeavor. Additionally, in advance of the retreat participants were invited to propose topics to focus the group's conversation, which were incorporated into the structure of the retreat. While most participants were able to attend in-person, we did offer a hybrid option.
The retreat focused on six major sessions spread across two days:
Day 1: Curriculum Building in Introductory Courses
Creating common learning outcomes
Assessment of learning outcomes
Classroom learning activities
Day 2: Support for Transfer Students
Transfer Pathways
Non-traditional instruction
Retention strategies
Next steps -- continuing the partnerships
On the first day, we focused on a set of course building activities, adapted from resources from Carnegie Mellon University (https://www.cmu.edu/teaching/designteach/index.html). These activities loosely followed the backwards design approach and supported participants in first considering the purpose of their course, moving into the finer details of a course as the day continued. Course design methods were used to both model the original group and to encourage instructors to work to agree on the big picture of the course, rather than get to caught in the details.
Each person was able to decide which subgroup they wanted to work with on the first day. This allowed participants to focus in on the courses they wanted to work on. We also hoped the grouping and buffer time would allow for natural discussions about transfer possibilities between institutions, which is what happened. We could then use these discussions to build on during later sessions.
The second day of the retreat focused more on how to help students commonly found within the transfer process, such as discussions about non-traditional instruction and retention strategies. These sessions were used to help keep the students we were serving in the fore-front of the discussion. Finally, on the second day we included space in the retreat for participants to co-generate agenda items and next steps. This aligned with our goal of using this retreat as a space to develop new, truly collaborative partnerships.
Feedback/Partnership Expansions
We invited attendees to provide feedback via an optional survey at the end of the retreat; responses are consolidated and presented here.
We received feedback from 10 out of 12 participants who attended the retreat in person, as well as feedback from one person who fully attended online. Participants joined the retreat with three primary goals in mind: to understand and influence transfer policies, to develop curriculum for specific computing and mathematics courses, and to collaborate and learn from others. Overall, all participants shared comments suggesting that these goals were met.
Faculty shared how the retreat increased their understanding of existing transfer policies and partnerships (e.g., the S-STEM project), as well as new efforts to improve transfer by the university (e.g., efforts to build reverse articulation agreements). These conversations supported instructors in seeing how their efforts to align curriculum might better support transfer students. For example, one instructor from a new partner wrote "we can focus on transferability to UNL which should also help us when it comes to other colleges such as UNK." Thus, the retreat allowed them to consider how transfer policies worked across multiple universities, so that they could work to better support transfer students whose transfer-receiving institutions were not yet determined. Consequently, this participant plans to work on aligning three courses with UNL, including their version of CS2.
Further, participants discussed how the retreat reinforced or supported their understanding of the importance of collaboration. One participant spoke about a desire, as a next step, to discuss retention strategies with the retention office at their college. Specifically, during the retreat several strategies for retention were shared, including "academic salutes", which is meant to be an alternative to academic flagging procedures, that is a formal, positive feedback system which allows instructors to document students' strengths with college advisors.
In addition to supporting transfer pathways, many participants named specific instructional methods or tools that they learned about and implement in their courses. This included new assessment practices (e.g., flexible due dates at the start of a semester, peer evaluations), ways to use technology (e.g., chatGPT), flipped classroom strategies, effective leveraging of peer tutoring supports, group work engagement strategies, etc.
In the feedback, almost all of the survey participants named between two-year and four-year institutions that they felt their home institution were more connected to because of this retreat. A participant from an associate-granting institution described the retreat as facilitating "a much more friendly transfer conversation with UNL than I have experienced in the last 20 years that I have been at [associate-granting institution]."
Authors: Alisha Bevins (Graduate Teaching Assistant), Brittany Duncan (Ross McCollum Associate Professor), Leen-Kiat Soh (Charles Bessey Professor and Senior Associate Director), University of Nebraska, School of Computing.