Rethinking college, and college life, to address the huge dropout problem that occurs early on after starting a “college program”, often within the first month of registration for freshman year, has been an ongoing challenge for years. And it turns out that some of the challenges of creating a more supportive “campus life” are connected to those of creating “a better methodology of learning”.
This is especially true for the issue of how much personal interaction students need to support their learning process, and how that might be obtained through a combination of social learning constructs using both online and F2F components.
We don’t have all those answers yet, and won’t for some time, but getting those answers will involve some of the changes and experimentation noted in the article below.
[gview file=”https://publicservicesalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Fixing-A-Broken-Freshman-Year-What-An-Overhaul-Might-Look-Like-NPR-Ed-NPR.pdf”]“Honestly, if I did not have … determination to do things on my own,” she says, “I probably would have fallen by the wayside like a lot of students did.”