IC News

Half of Ithaca College’s incoming class, about 600 first-year students, got a head start on their IC experience this summer.

An Office of Extended Studies pilot program offered incoming students the opportunity to earn up to three credits through online summer seminars. The first one-credit class was free, with each additional class just $150 — a substantial savings off the typical price of $1,088 per credit.

“On average, students opted to take two classes,” says Andrew Utterson, associate professor of screen studies and director of the Ithaca Seminar Program. “So it turned out to be an extremely popular program.”

The Ithaca Summer Seminars were the brainchild of Jennifer Wofford, director of extended studies, who came up with the idea to engage students prior to the start of the semester. This summer’s seminars served as an introduction to the technology IC uses for online classes, including its learning management system, Sakai. And the program got incoming students thinking about how to achieve the college experience they want despite the pandemic, says English professor Elizabeth Bleicher, who taught the other foundation seminar.

“Our goals were really to help students get excited about coming to college,” she says, “to start preparing them mentally and emotionally and intellectually for the transition.”

With that in mind, faculty designed the pass/fail classes to foster student connections. Class sessions were typically capped at 20 people, with video chat discussions and a focus on small-group assignments and interactions, says Bleicher. Recent IC grads pitched in as “near-peer leaders” to provide guidance.

Students opting to earn more than one credit could explore more than two dozen “deep dive” courses from departments across the college, covering topics like video game design for social impact, managing personal finances, and storytelling patterns in fairy tales.

For their first class, students chose between two foundation courses: College: Why Are We Here? and Community: A Shared Experience.

Bleicher’s “College” course — which students quickly renamed “Learning How to Learn” — worked on skills, mindsets and traits that “help them go from being passive students to active learners,” she says.

“We talked about holding yourself accountable, setting SMART goals and finding accountability partners, if that's important to you. We talked about procrastination and the psychology behind it,” she says. “A real goal was to just change their approach to their own learning.”

And that extends to when the community is spread across the globe.

“In any one given section, students were from across the college in terms of schools, departments, and majors, but geographically diverse, too,” Utterson says. “Remote learning allowed us to bring students together simultaneously that would never have been able to do so in any other summer ... all of us brought together by way of Zoom to be able to find connections and some universal humanity of the transition to college."

In post-seminar surveys, more than 9 in 10 participants “agree or strongly agree that they feel more prepared for college now,” Bleicher says. “They also are reporting that, anecdotally, online education is much better in college than it was in high school. So that's making them feel calmer and more assured.”