A series of courses on the Evolution of Ideas introduces interdisciplinary study, develops collaborative discourse, and promotes a sense of community among first-year honors students. The curriculum encourages faculty to use a range of strategies to help students understand an idea and its history while also fostering awareness as to its social,…

Undergraduate first-year courses are often mandatory for students in a variety of majors and degrees. Many students view these core courses as of little interest and relevance, which is associated with lack of motivation for study and can lead to cheating. Contract cheating in text-based is difficult to detect and prove. Contract cheating in…

Public art is placed in relation to its surroundings, conveying messages that are open to interpretation and thus proposing conversations between art/aesthetics, geography, histories and the subjectivity of the viewer. As such, it can engender possibilities to 'politicize our relations with place'. Embracing the vision of a multidisciplinary…

Field trips, field courses, and other forms of field-based pedagogy have a long and storied history in geography and are frequently described as essential components of geographic education at the college, secondary, and primary levels. A recent and expanding literature on best practices for field-based geographical education provides instructors…

University students crave immersive, collaborative, interdisciplinary, applied learning contextualized to real world sustainability challenges. Liberal arts and sciences institutions are particularly well positioned to respond. Here we report on our high impact, cross-disciplinary, biomimicry-themed firstyear experience (FYE) curricula. Biomimicry…

We report on a large-scale implementation of mastery-based grading in a General Education Introductory Statistics course at California State University Los Angeles. In Fall 2018, the course had 80 sections of approximately 30 students each and was taught by 37 instructors who ranged from long-time, experienced instructors to brand new teaching…

Based on theoretical findings from the literature on the integration of reading and writing pedagogies used with hearing postsecondary students to advance academic literacy, this article offers a model of instruction for achieving academic literacy in developmental and freshman composition courses composed of deaf students. Academic literacy is…

In Anatomy and Physiology courses, students often struggle with visualizing structures, or processes, that occur at the cellular level, such as capillary exchange. Whenever available, models can be vital to students' understanding of a topic, particularly when they can be constructed by students in real time. To demonstrate capillary exchange to…

Team projects and in-class interactions are the hallmark of a freshmen introductory course in biomedical engineering (BME). Our challenge was to continue team activities, mentoring, and the semester-long design project in a virtual environment after in-person classes ended due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper highlights some of the adaptations…

As students are asked to complete multimodal assignments in their higher education courses, librarians can guide students to the use of open educational resources (OER), as many librarians are already teaching students about copyright and how to respect intellectual property rights. Two instructional librarians designed a one-shot lesson for…

It is common for freshmen students to enter Calculus I with a wide range of levels of preparation and mastery of background material. In addition, many of the students struggle with the adjustment from high school to college. In an effort to help the students to solidify their understanding of concepts as they progress through the course, as well…

For business schools, AACSB and Middle States' call for more experiential learning is one reason to provide study abroad programs. Universities must attend to the demand for continuous improvement and employ metrics to benchmark and evaluate their relative standing among peer institutions. One such benchmark is the National Survey of Student…

First-year students at many universities find themselves in new communities, with little understanding of how their new university, city, academic, or career communities function. Developing a student's sense of community can have long-term benefits. Using the theme of "Community" in the basic public speaking course provides students with…

First year college students are challenged both socially and academically in their transition to college life. The literature suggests that social and emotional competence skills can help with this transition. This article describes the course content for a University freshman seminar that teaches skills in social and emotional competence in order…

This article focuses on the development of an engaging library orientation module for UC San Diego First Year Experience (FYE) courses. The library module included a brief in-class presentation about research concepts and library services, an online interactive library scavenger hunt given as an in-class activity, and a homework assignment where…