8 College Success Skills: Welcome to Lehman
In these parts of the course students learn about Lehman, its systems, structure and geography. They also think about their own strengths (and challenges). Students often mention wanting “The College Experience” and sometimes that just involves living a dorm away from home. We can’t provide that, but we can help them see ways that the college experience is about more than dorms.
The modules have been designed to not take more than 15-20 of class time to explain and then the students should be able to do them as homework. However, you can decide to use class times to ones that you decide are important to your course. They should take students 90-120 minutes, but this will depend on the student. But remember students for whom English is a language they have learned may need more time.
The mini modules are shorter, about 30 minutes for most students if they concentrate, Many of them engage with outside platforms.
Modules
Each module has a short assignment attached to it. Module 0 is the discussion board introduction. “Change is Ubiquitous” has an activity on a different platform that we will share additional information about separately. The rest are brief, structured reflections on the material in the module. So, the idea is that if you do not want to talk about it in class you can assign the whole thing as homework.
Module 0: Introductions and Getting Started
Think about an ice breaker for students to introduce themselves to each other. Encourage them to connect .
In our module 0 the task is to introduce themselves on the discussion board.
We suggest that you ask students for a phonetic spelling of their name, a recording of how it is pronounced, and their pronouns because, in fact, it is hard to tell even cisgender identity when there are students from so may different backgrounds. We also suggest you have them write down the names of their professors and their emails. A surprising number of students never figure out the names of their instructors! Doing this will really help them.
Many students will have not seen a syllabus before. Take the time to go over the parts of a syllabus and where to find key information.. Because the students will mainly have all the same classes you could also go over their other syllabuses.
This is also a good chance to take a few minutes to have students install the Blackboard App and the Lehman App. The CircleIn App is also a great way for them to connect and form study groups. If possible, convince them to use their Lehman emails in Blackboard; many still will have addresses from their high schools and they may disappear.