Refining/Maintaining

FIRE 1000 ("Freshmen Introduction to Reasoning Essentials") is a first-year course that stimulates students' academic self-efficacy, depth of intellectual inquiry, and problem-solving skills. This is done through research and reflection to understand themselves better, their purpose, and the campus community. FIRE 1000 was launched in 2017 and is required at GSC for all new and transfer students under 13 credit hours.

Always Alert is Gordon State College's early alert academic intervention program. The program is intended to help students at-risk of not succeeding in one or more classes. The program relies on volunteer faculty academic coaches to conduct one-on-one meetings. The program uses Navigate to facilitate outreach, appointment-making, and record-keeping.

GSU participates in a 7-institution University Innovation Alliance (UIA) initiative funded by the Kresge Foundation, conducting focus groups on identifying student success barriers. Through focus groups (30-50 students), we talk to different undergraduate populations, including First-Year, Transfer and Transition, Career Services users, and Academic Support users. Each semester targets a new population, gathering qualitative data to inform institutional improvements.

The Accelerator Academy is an academic program offered in the summer semester to students who did not successfully complete their introductory English class during the academic year. Students are offered wrap around academic support to help them understand how to successfully engage the material and complete the course successfully.  The goal of this course is to help increase student progression in order to meet the USG’s goal of completing English by the end of the freshmen year (30 hours).

We are engaging in a large-scale analysis of student success metrics related to curricular complexity to analyze its impact on student time to degree. Curricular Complexity provides a way to analyze the impact of course sequences and required credit hours on a student’s successful progression through the curriculum and their time to degree. Research has shown that curricular complexity is directly related to time to degree; reducing curricular complexity should therefore reduce time to degree for students.

Refresh the advising checklist/program maps we constructed at the first stages of Momentum by incorporating Core IMPACTS and reviewing course sequencing recommendations. Provide printed maps to each new student attending orientation.

A team formed between Advising, Orientation, and Career Services that will continue to work with the undecided student population. We created a plan to intervene early with undecided students to connect them with resources to help them make a purposeful choice. The plan begins at orientation with a breakout session designed to get undecided students thinking about making a purposeful choice and continues once the semester begins with strategic talking points during advising appointments.

The EXACT Plan consolidates GGC’s existing experiential learning resources and practices, expands upon that campuswide inventory by fostering a culture of curricular practice, strengthens practices through focused faculty training that integrates ePortfolio and critical thinking pedagogies into GGC’s expanding experiential learning profile, and operationalizes strategies for ensuring access to all students. 

Experiential learning and critical thinking are the topics of GGC’s current QEP.

Summer Programming and Onboarding interventions aim to support growth mindset and increase college knowledge among incoming first-year students and some targeted populations of non-first year students. Specific interventions include engagement with GCPS high school seniors, initial Summer Bridge programming, the Summer Preparatory Academic Resource Camps (SPARC) and pre-Fall welcome activities on campus.

Learning Communities are a high-impact practice that help students establish relationships while learning in three linked classes that are relevant to their meta-major/academic focus area: Business (BUSI); Education (EDUC); Health Professions (HEPR); Humanities and Arts (HUAR); Information Technology (ITEC); Social Sciences (SOSC); or Science, Technology and Math (STEM). We aim to scale first-year LCs so all new full-time first-year students enroll in an LC by an opt-out approach.