Sasha Hull
Lantern Staff
For the 2018-2019 school year, changes were made regarding courses and how students are set to succeed in receiving associate degrees. All Butler freshmen are required to enroll in and pass a first year seminar course in order to graduate. The redesign for Butler was to implement Pathways, a simplified degree path that enables students to complete two years at Butler without wasting time or money on classes that are not needed.
The inspiration for this redesign came from the rising amount of success from other community colleges implementing Pathways for their students. The goal is to “Choose a program and develop an academic plan early on, have a clear road map of the courses they need to take to complete a credential and receive guidance and support to help them stay on plan,” according to the Community College Research Center at Columbia University Teaching college. This plan gives students a clear and precise course catalog for each semester, straying from the traditional standards of letting students pick and choose courses loosely based on their degree requirements.
Before spring break, the preliminary numbers on the Pathways design came in showing the first indication of the success at Butler. These numbers showed that students enrolled in the seminar course were coming back to enroll at a higher rate and that students succeeding in the course had a higher overall GPA compared to those who were not as successful. Although the numbers calculated are only for the first semester’s outcome, it is a hopeful sign to those behind this change.
One faculty member who led a force in Butler adopting the Pathways model is Associate Professor of English Cory Teubner. Teubner is working with other faculty to build better research in order to determine the most accurate results from these courses and changes at Butler.
“We have reason to think that students that were enrolled in the PDX classes were more likely to be retained, in other words, come back and enroll classes,” Teubner said. “Also students with a C or better in the class had a higher GPA than students who did not take the course.”
There are a large number of factors that go into student’s success and the number of students that continue taking courses and eventually leave Butler with an associates degree.
“We’re working very hard to be sure that the class has the impact we hope it will have,” Teubner said.
One difficulty behind making changes is the acceptance from students and faculty. While some faculty were hesitant to adopt this model at Butler, the success and existing numbers from other schools were proof that a PDX course would be a positive outcome for students.
“To me, the class was helpful to stay organized, time management, get work done on time and learning to keep a calendar,” freshman Sydney Scanlon said. “It is beneficial to students, especially student athletes moving from high school to college and being taught how to correctly manage time.”
If Scanlon could change one thing about the PDX course, it would be to make the class a standard class as opposed to the current mixed course type, which has the class meet once face-to-face and implements online modules throughout the rest of the week.
Freshman Jance Burris, however, felt otherwise regarding the PDX seminar class.
“I felt it was a waste of time and busy work,” Burris said. “It was a paid version of a course I had already taken in high school. College students should already have these studying and note taking skills.”
One new change Burris would make would be to change the assignments to be more relevant or helpful to students and their future, and more upscale than those similar high school courses.
The main goals of Pathways is to keep students enrolled and help achieve higher success rates at schools across the country. Smaller goals for Pathways is to teach students college survival skills and help build goals in higher education. The future of PDX at Butler is to do just that. While it will take another year to know the true results at Butler, faculty is already planning on improving the seminar class.
“This summer we are going to tweak and revise courses with a full year of experience with them based on feedback from students and faculty,” Teubner said.