No textbook cost general education pathway: an effort to increase retention at Central Washington University

Purpose This study aims to describe a project that aims to give students a choice to complete their general education requirements without purchasing a textbook. Design/methodology/approach In total, 26 faculty, teaching in the new general education curriculum, at Central Washington University were given stipends to eliminate expensive textbooks and use free to the student resources such as open educational resources (OER) or library resources. The data was collected on student savings and student and faculty satisfaction with the program. Findings Many paths were created through the general education curriculum, so a student may easily finish these requirements without purchasing a textbook. The data from this case study coincide with the literature on the subject. Faculty found it fairly easy to replace their required textbooks with pedagogically sound, free resources. Students were relieved to have some financial relief and found the resources to be good. The student’s biggest complaint was that faculty often use very small portions of expensive required textbooks. Research limitations/implications This is a case study and the results are limited as such. This is one university and one general education curriculum. Also, if an academic library wants to replicate this case study, some funding is required. Practical implications Students struggle financially and alleviating the costs of textbooks is one-way librarians can ease that burden. Social implications Students struggle financially and alleviating the costs of textbooks is one-way librarians can ease that burden. Originality/value There have been some case studies written about OER, where 8 or 10 courses are replaced. There are studies written about zero-textbook-cost degrees at community colleges, but this case study explores a textbook-cost-free general education program at a state university.

Surfacing disciplinarity: Citation as a site for integrative learning

Despite nearly ubiquitous general education requirements for students to take courses across disciplines, disciplinarity itself is often invisible to students and taken for granted by professors. We argue that surfacing these divisions and demystifying academic structures is, paradoxically, a key step in educating students toward the crossing of intellectual borders. In this article, we engage current Scholarship of Teaching and Learning to discuss the challenges both faculty and students face in navigating multidisciplinary general education programs, and we offer a practical resource for facilitating such integrative learning and pedagogy. This resource, a two-page handout outlining the disciplinary values behind the research processes and citation practices across several academic domains, can be used in a variety of settings—including classrooms and professional development workshops—for both student and faculty audiences, to achieve multiple purposes, including teaching and learning disciplinarity; demystifying disciplinary writing conventions; and assignment-, course-, or curricular redesign.

Re-thinking Higher Education Curricula in the Era of Knowledge Economy: A Case Study of Course Codes in the National Curriculum of Pakistan

The study reviewed the course codes at undergraduate level in selected universities and Higher Education Commission (HEC). The objectives of the study were to investigate the coding system of courses and propose a system for coding the courses at tertiary level in Pakistan. The coding system of different universities, inside and outside Pakistan, was analyzed and a system of coding was proposed. The study found discrepancies in the coding of courses that cause difficulties for academic bodies and transfer of credits from one university to another. It is recommended that courses of a degree required may be divided in 1) General Education requirements, 2) Subject specific foundation courses, 3) subject specific major compulsory courses, and 4) subject specific major elective courses. For codes 2, 3 or 4 capital letters for a subject along with three numbers (xxx) may be used to specify each course of the university. The left digit of the three may be used for the hardship level. The courses 1xx, 2xx, 3xx and 4xx will be taught in the first, second, third and fourth year, respectively and research may be given 500 at undergraduate level, courses of 5 year may be placed in 5xx and research may be coded as 599. The graduate level courses for MPhil /MS /PhD may be coded as 6xx, 7xx and 8xx for MPhil and PhD all over the country.

This worksheet works: Making the DLS Standards work for you

The ACRL Standards for Distance Learning Library Services are increasingly used by librarians who are striving to provide adequate and equitable services to their online learning populations. In an environment where more fully online programs are springing up, more campus-wide strategic plans include moving general education requirements online, and more students than ever are enrolled in distance or online classes, these Standards can be useful for advocacy, communication to stakeholders, and driving goals and direction both for your library as a whole and for your distance or online learning librarian.

Enrollment patterns and students’ risk of academic difficulty

Purpose Experiencing academic difficulty can deter students’ academic momentum, decreasing the speed with which they complete coursework and increasing the odds that they will not persist to a credential. The purpose of this paper is to expand upon an existing framework that investigates students’ academic difficulty in co-enrolled courses by adding additional co-enrollment variables that may influence academic performance in introductory gateway courses. Design/methodology/approach This study uses quantile regression to better understand academic difficulty in co-enrolled courses and the impact that students’ co-enrollment patterns may have on their success in focal introductory gateway courses. Findings This study revealed significant relationships between student success and co-enrollment patterns, including: the disciplinary alignment of the course with a student’s major, the student’s co-enrollment in other difficult courses and experiencing below average academic performance in a co-enrolled course. Further, impact of these relationships often differed by students’ performance quantile in the focal course. Practical implications The results point to factors related to the student and their co-enrolled courses that faculty, academic advisors and curriculum committees can consider as they design general education requirements within and across disciplinary majors. Originality/value This approach advances the understanding of how a prescribed curriculum produces interdependent pathways that can promote or deter students’ success through the organization of curricular requirements and student course taking. The paper provides a generalizable methodology that can be used by other universities to investigate curricular pathways that have the potential to reduce student success.

Internationalized Courses on Campus

Internationalizing the community college curriculum offers an opportunity to reach a broad range of students completing their general education requirements. Implementing course internationalization on campus also maximizes the student body's participation in international education, particularly in community college contexts where study abroad is not a viable option for many students due to resource limitations. Efforts to internationalize the curriculum should target high-enrolled courses across campus that fit within existing programs of study. Faculty coordinating these courses are integral in extending the scope of the course objectives by integrating international perspectives. Faculty work is acknowledged through existing structures of professional development and annual review processes. An internationalized curriculum combined with study abroad and other cross-cultural experiential learning forms the framework for an academic enrichment program called Global Distinction.

Lattice dissections: plainer and less fancy

The title of this Article pays homage to Greg Frederickson's widelyknown book on geometrical dissections, Dissections: Plane & Fancy [1]. I enjoyed the book so much, I built an honours geometry course around it − a terminal mathematics course for honours students needing a mathematics credit for their general education requirements. Not only is there significant geometry involved, but there is a fair amount of number theory relevant to finding infinite families of dissections of, for example, m squares to n squares.However, although many dissections from one regular polygon to another are quite elegant, the mathematics involved in specifying the dissections is often formidable.