William Kay, Steven M. Smith, Katelynn Carter-Rogers, Vurain Tabvuma, & Emma Sylvester

Evolution of FYE Programming

Although various versions of first-year seminar courses have existed in post-secondary education for some time, many would argue that the FYS movement became mainstream with the efforts of John Gardner and his colleagues at the University of South Carolina, beginning in the late 1970’s (Gilbert et al., 1997; see also Gardner, 2023, for a history of FYS and FYE initiatives). First-year seminar courses started as writing courses to help students new to college and university learn how to be more effective writers. After World War II, there was a shift in post-secondary education away from the elitist (and typically religious) approaches, to a more egalitarian (for white males at least) perspective on who should participate in college and university. During the 1960s and 1970s, barriers for women and minorities in post-secondary education (PSE) started to be mitigated, and international students became more common on campuses in North America. With these shifts in demographics, there came an understanding that the “typical” college or university student was changing, as were their needs for transition and learning supports, once they arrived on campus. There was also a consequent shift in how educators taught, with student engagement becoming more important than simply lecturing to large rooms full of students.

Slowly, with many trials and errors, specific stand alone, credit and non-credit, first-year seminar courses began to be introduced. Over time, these courses have morphed into the integration of general skills to support student success and fostering metacognitive and reflective practice. Now, they can include a wide range of topics including writing, reading, note-taking, time management, study skills, intercultural awareness, financial literacy, critical thinking and many other topics, all designed to support students as they transition into (and through) post-secondary education. As noted by Gilbert et al, (1997) the first-year experience involves a philosophical approach that focuses on what can be done to support student success, rather than the historical “sink or swim” approach to academia and encourages educators to think about the student experience from the student’s perspective. This reflects an issue that the authors of this chapter often discuss: “the curse of knowledge”. The term was first coined by Camerer et al., (1989), and when applied to academia, refers to the fact that educators cannot forget what they already know and what they experienced as students. This affects their beliefs about what is a “reasonable”, and a “typical” university experience, which has been shaped by their own experiences in terms of how they became successful, and subsequently employed as graduates. As a result, it requires effort to understand their students’ experiences which are undoubtedly different from their own. This was a fundamental rethinking of how to approach education, focusing not on where students need to be, but where they have been and where they are when they arrive.

Types of FYS Programming

FYS courses come in a wide variety of formats. Based on the survey that was done for this monograph (see Chapter 2), more than half of the institutions who responded to the survey indicated that they offered a specific FYE course. Not quite half of these courses were offered for academic credit, and about a third indicated that completion of an FYE course was a graduation requirement. Two-thirds offered the FYE course as a standalone course, with the rest having combined them with some other course or program. Interestingly, universities reported more frequently that their FYE courses were offered for credit in comparison to colleges.

The variety of how these courses have been developed and offered in Canadian post-secondary education (PSE) institutions is not surprising. Many of these programs have evolved organically over time, and thus have developed into a variety of approaches. When new components or approaches are added, they get folded into existing courses or programs. At some institutions, FYE courses were taught for credit, as was the case at the University of Prince Edward Island (UPEI), until recently. At other institutions, such as Queen’s University, the “First Year Foundations” course has been developed by staff and delivered as a self-directed set of modules taught for no credit. In many small liberal arts colleges, there are core, for-credit writing courses, where students are taught basic academic skills, similar to the model originally developed by John Gardner at the University of South Carolina (Gardner, 2023).

A somewhat rarer approach, and the one that will be the focus of this chapter, has been the integration of student success programming into required first-year courses. In this co-curricular model, rather than making the student academic skills course a separate course (for credit or not for credit) the skills components are integrated into common or required first-year courses, such as first-year math, chemistry, psychology, or business management. In addition to basic skills like writing, how to write a test and how to read a text, skills such as financial literacy, career development, and time management are integrated into, and taught alongside that content. This is done to make these skills relevant not only to the student’s experience, but to the course content itself, thereby improving consolidation and retention of the skills being taught.

One reason for taking this approach is to circumvent some of the typical criticisms of student skills courses. There has always been friction between the desire to support student academic success, while fulfilling the goal of the colleges and universities of enforcing “academic rigour”. By integrating student success skills into course content rather than replacing course content (or requiring a separate course), it not only limits the amount of course content that needs to be displaced but can also reinforce the learnings from courses.

Other challenges we experienced in preliminary conversations in considering a traditional FYS model, was that if it was for credit, it would need to be taught by faculty and this made the cost a notable impediment, if we were trying to follow the established smaller class size model of about 20-25 students.  Further, if we followed this model, it would increase the number of additional classrooms we would need, and the lack of suitable classrooms for this type of course were also significant obstacles that encouraged a more curricular imbedded approach. As we will outline below, this is a challenging process that takes ongoing commitment from faculty and academic support staff (which includes human resources dedicated to both faculty development and student learning support), and sacrifices are necessary. It also requires that, though course sections can be large, there must also be allowances made for the implementation of supplemental lab or tutorial sessions to facilitate smaller group interactions. This requires significant resource allocation to schedule staff and to run effectively and is not necessarily possible for all courses at the first-year level.

FYE in Co-curricular Design

Although the standard practice and approach for enhancing student success in most post-secondary Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) has primarily relied upon the FYS (Barton & Donahue, 2009; Mamrick, 2005), certain institutional contexts face constraints that prevent adequate funding and space in the curriculum to devote exclusively to this type of one-semester or full-year programming (Bers & Younger, 2014).  As a result, some HEIs have turned towards other supports and interventions that include immersive and extended onboarding orientation programs, student advising, and peer coaching (Keup & Proudfoot, 2005).

Evidence has pointed towards co-curricular program designs as being more adaptive and effective interventions for supporting student success in first and even second-year tertiary programming (Hinds et al., 2014). As a method of implementing activities and reflective learning approaches into the academic curriculum, co-curricular programming involves more immersive student engagement and fosters a more direct application of introduced student success elements to the content delivered in core academic programming (Dean, 2015). By integrating these student success elements directly into the academic curriculum (Suskie, 2015) this approach better relates the sometimes seemingly “other” or “extra” positive intentions of more commonly offered FYS or extra-curricular opportunities. Further, it provides ‘just-in-time’ learning experiences for students, so they receive the content that is needed, when it is needed and in the desired format.

It was precisely the identification of formidable institutional barriers and collective beliefs based on evidence, that led our Student Success Curriculum (SSC) working team at Saint Mary’s University (SMU) to pursue a more integrated co-curricular approach to designing, developing, and ultimately delivering an innovative first-year co-curriculum program. Although somewhat challenging to implement, our SSC working team felt that the integration of student success elements into existing first-year courses could be relatively cost-effective and efficient to pilot as this grassroots curriculum initiative did not involve any lengthy or cumbersome institutional approval processes. Furthermore, and as later validated through research (Tabvuma, et al., 2023), our SSC working team felt that this authentic and applied approach would facilitate enhanced student success in better understanding course material, while having a positive and lasting effect on student attitudes, skills, and behaviours.

The co-curricular program was initially based on a popular and widely used FYE textbook but was eventually reconceptualized into a bespoke program better tailored to the needs of SMU students, called SMU Spark. The bespoke program modules were designed by our lead learning skills strategist based on extensive consultations with, and feedback elicited from, students, student affairs professionals, and the faculty members who were planning to teach in the program.  The module content focused on many standard FYE student success topics (e.g. time management, effective study strategies, etc.) utilizing direct references to our own campus environment and resources, attempting to make the material more authentic and meaningful to our undergraduate student population. The module material and resources were all available for faculty to select within a shared repository, housed within our institutional online learning management system (LMS).

Although we felt that this approach would appeal to faculty – since this design was not institutionally prescribed and enabled instructors to contribute their own ideas and control their own curriculum decisions – there were challenges to overcome when it came to canvassing for support and active participation. As a volunteer-based pilot curriculum initiative, some faculty were hesitant to participate due to perceptions that this approach would involve adding more time and effort to their already overprescribed schedules and commitments. Furthermore, there were strong opinions voiced about the appropriateness of implementing material that was non-academic into a core first-year curriculum, which was already perceived to be oversubscribed. As a result, there was a need to establish adequate curriculum development supports and cultivate a sense of community around the concept of this curriculum initiative.

What are Faculty Learning Communities?

Fostering a sense of collective campus community engagement around the enhancement of student success between students, staff, and faculty is essential in facilitating any significant and innovative changes within the higher educational landscape (Harrill et al., 2015). However, the higher educational context is unique, involving many diverse and complex (often competing) organizational structures under one institutional umbrella. This ecosystem is further complicated by various and differing, and at times conflicting, employment conditions for both faculty and staff that are bound and protected within their respective union affiliations and corresponding collective agreements.

Under these conditions and learned through our own experiences at SMU, enlisting support on academic and curriculum innovation initiatives from both faculty and academic support staff involves a mixture of clear communication, social management skills, and a high degree of volunteerism and goodwill.  Social learning venues such as Communities of Practice (CoPs) have proven effective in garnering collegial support on shared and collaborative initiatives that seek to achieve meaningful change within the higher education sector (Mercieca, 2017). Originally intended as lateral collaborative social learning venues, CoPs work most efficiently when members are assembled in a community-based setting within a situated learning environment, exploring and sharing practice within a collective domain of interest (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998).

However, the concept of Faculty Learning Communities (FLCs) as social learning venues, is considered to align more effectively in facilitating impactful teaching, learning, and curriculum changes within a more academically focused environment that exists within the larger higher educational ecosystem (Bailey et al., 2022; Cox & McDonald, 2017; Ward & Selvester, 2012).  FLCs have been characterized as “a special type of CoP in higher education that is structured, multidisciplinary, yearlong, voluntary, and focused on improving and enhancing teaching and learning related issues and concerns (Cox, 2013, p. 18). Operating within either a cohort-based (a localized and shared concern identified amongst a faculty cohort) or a topic-based (addressing a more expansive campus-wide concern) context, FLC members address their common concerns with the intention of improving professional practice within the classroom, culminating in the output of scholarly products aimed at sharing with a wider audience through knowledge mobilization venues such as journal publications, and presenting at academic conferences (Cox, 2004).

FLCs at SMU 

At SMU, we decided to adapt the FLC model as characterized by Cox (2004, 2013) to fit more naturally within our institutional context. Following a topic-based approach, FLCs were created within our three faculties (Arts, Science, and Business) with the interest of developing a co-curricular approach in addressing student success amongst first- and even second-year students. As a first step, our academic support staff team (which had their own CoP), canvassed for faculty volunteers teaching first-year courses within each faculty. As the topic we were exploring was significant in scope and iterative in terms of ongoing curriculum development, we had envisioned a sustainable FLC model where faculty participants could enlist on either a limited- or longer-term basis. In addition to the faculty-specific FLCs, our engagement ecosystem also allowed for cross-faculty meeting venues to share emerging co-curricular developments and strategies for approaching student success within our FYE program.

Preliminary feedback that we’ve received about our adapted FLC engagement approach has been positive. As part of a current research project still under development in assessing value creation perspectives (Wenger et al., 2011), we facilitated focus groups and an end-of-term survey for both faculty and academic support staff (Kay et al., 2024). Unattributed faculty feedback about immediate value included sentiments that the FLC meeting venues offered “just the right amount of time to connect, but not so much that it was overwhelming” and that “sharing ideas was productive”.  Furthermore, faculty feedback on realized value from participation indicated that “the [SMU Spark] modules help students gain skills for increased success” and that faculty engagement in this co-curricular initiative was transformative with one faculty member commenting that the experience “has made me think about how to scaffold in different skills over appropriate timelines, and the amount of learning that our students are doing in addition to course content”.

Constructive faculty feedback indicated room to utilize more informal and formative “chats about successes and challenges” via a virtual platform.  Similarly, our academic support staff found value in their FLC collaboration indicating a reduction of “barriers through collaboration and communication between faculty, teaching supports, and student services”.  Feedback from academic support staff in terms of realized value included sentiments that this type of collaborative venue “has extended beyond faculty-staff connections” in “welcoming other contributors across the university” and that “building further trust between teaching and support staff” had helped in “shaping” more positive impressions about certain member positions within the university.

Although the attitudinal response data is still early in development and requires further analysis, results obtained thus far indicate that our use in framing interdisciplinary collaboration through an adapted FLC approach has been both supportive and engaging for participants. While a burden of organizational management has been placed upon the academic support staff, faculty seem pleased with the level of support they had received which has had a positive impact on their continued engagement and participation in this co-curricular initiative.

Does This Approach Work?

When launching a Strategic Enrolment Management (SEM) plan, or any student success initiative, it is important to ensure that your program is designed not only around best practice but also in such a way as to make assessment a key element (Smith et al., 2021; 2023). We noted above that one challenge for comprehensive FYE programs is that academics sometimes struggle to understand their value and see them as “getting in the way” of “real” academic courses. Therefore, being able to demonstrate the value of FYE programming is important and, whenever possible, to also assess program outcomes and connect the program to key performance indicators such as student sense of belonging, satisfaction, grades, and retention.

When the SEM plan was developed at our institution, there had never been anything like it before at SMU (see Smith et al., 2021). Although there had been student transition programming in place for several years, the initiatives were diverse and spread across the university with little to no cohesive strategy. Units typically did not communicate about their programs, much less coordinate them. In developing the SEM plan, assessment was deemed to be vitally important to justify the funds that had been requested to launch the initiatives in the plan (see Smith et al., 2023).

Therefore, the assessment of FYE program was fundamental to the approach we took. The initial version of the program was launched in the business school, in the “Introduction to Business Management” course, which was required for all incoming business students. The same instructor (Tabvuma) taught all four sections of the course. The course had four large lecture sections that met once per week, and smaller, 25-30 student tutorials that also met once per week. All tests and assignments within the lecture sections were identical. The FYE content was incorporated into the tutorial sessions. We surveyed students ahead of time to understand their predictions of how well they could find their way around campus, meet academic demands, be involved in campus activities, their willingness to participate in internships, and their ability to find career information and other items. Although the content has evolved over time, topics covered included: knowledge of campus, group collaboration, managing stress, time management, career planning, how to read a text, how to take notes, presentation skills, effective writing, inclusive practices, and other topics. Importantly, we randomly assigned tutorial sections to either have the FYE content or to have the standard “Introduction to Business Management” content. We were then able to compare the performance of students in the experimental (FYE) or control (standard) conditions.

In a post-test at the end of the course, we found that all students’ academic ability self-evaluations reduced, but students in the FYE group reduced less in terms of how well they could find their way around campus, meet academic demands, be involved in campus activities, their willingness to participate in internships, and finding career information (Tabvuma, et al., 2023). We were also able to show that students in the FYE sections had higher mid-term and final grades, in both in-person and online courses, and that the FYE group adapted to transition better than the traditional course approach (see Tabvuma et al., 2021).

Importantly, we also tracked student retention over subsequent years and found that first to second year retention was significantly higher in the FYE condition (80.7%) versus the non-FYE groups (69.1%). Thus, by doing careful and systematic assessment we were able to provide compelling evidence that integrating FYE content in academic courses was possible and effective, and not only had no negative impact on students’ academic progress (i.e., people were concerned that using FYE content would “take away” from the academic content and student would be poorly prepared to move forward) but substantially increased the likelihood that students would continue at the institution. It is worth noting that at SMU at the time the program was developed, we had calculated that a 1% increase in student retention would result in an almost $500,000 increase in student tuition revenue per year. Thus a 10% increase across the institution could have resulted in $5 million dollars in additional revenue (Smith et al., 2023).

Challenges

Course Structure

It is well established that FYS courses are most effective when taught in small groups that allow for individual interactions. Traditional FYS courses have 25-30 people in each course section. Even at smaller universities and colleges limiting first-year course sections to 25 students is costly. There are challenges with having an appropriate teaching space and challenges of scheduling courses. As noted above, when this was implemented at SMU cost was a factor, so we integrated the student success components into the lab and tutorial sections. If we had been forced to restructure courses, it is unlikely we would have been able to implement the program.

Start-up Costs

Another factor to be aware of are the start-up costs for such a program. Costs associated with these programs differ depending on how the course is structured and there are many considerations for how best to cover these costs. But some obvious types of costs to consider are:

Faculty salaries (either part-time or full-time)

Staff costs (to run tutorials, peer mentor groups, create content)

Material costs (such as books or activities)

Content development costs (to create content)

Ongoing costs of teaching assistants or markers

Sustainability

An issue that is particularly germane in FYE curriculum programming is institutional support and sustainability. Following from the challenges highlighted above (and shared amongst most colleges and universities) are the issues of program funding and making student success an institutional priority (Headlam, 2018).  As COVID-19 has had an undeniable negative effect on university enrolments worldwide, this too has resulted in formidable fiscal challenges and a sense of competing economic priorities for HEIs (Kirby, 2024). Since the creation and development of our own co-curricular FYE program at SMU, we have experienced a dramatic decrease in funding and overall support from the administration. At times, it has seemed that efforts to increase enrolments through the development of new programs have trumped efforts to maintain funding that was once earmarked to enhance the student learning experience. As the pandemic has also caused significant learning gaps in student transitions to the post-secondary environment (Linden et al., 2021; Pownall et al., 2022; Smith et al., 2022), the perceived peril of this shift puts at risk the recreation and persistence of continued student retention issues that our FYE program sought to mitigate.

Senior leadership transition has also inadvertently caused a disruption in the general awareness of the program and its benefits for students. Where the program and its various developmental stakeholders (e.g. academic support staff and faculty) once received generous support and recognition, there is a sense that this support is now fading amidst new and prevalent competing institutional priorities. These changes and challenges have translated into an overall message of trying to accomplish more with much less. This general absence of institutional recognition and incentivization has understandably resulted in further challenges in recruiting an already overstretched faculty (and staff) population to participate, and/or even continue to participate, in the program.

Discussion

As an intervention designed to enhance student success at SMU, our co-curricular approach has aligned well within our institutional context and has been regarded as an appropriate fit for the implementation of authentic pedagogical application within the selected first-year courses where this program has been piloted. Despite the challenges identified above, the program is still running successfully and is in the process of expanding to more first-year courses within our three faculties. Yet, it remains important to continue monitoring challenges in better planning and preparations for any unforeseeable obstacles that may cause existential threats to the sustainability of the program. Within the context of our current financial challenges, it has become integral for our co-curricular working team to continue fostering mindsets around the importance of student success at SMU and mutually exploring new and innovative teaching and learning approaches in supporting the program.

In terms of appealing for continued and increasing engagement from both academic support staff and faculty – many of whom are freely volunteering additional time and resources to the program – we feel that building a sense of community around student success is crucial in ensuring ongoing commitment to this initiative.  Fostering and nurturing a vision around student success has been essential in building and strengthening social relationships and partnerships throughout our institution. The creation of social learning communities, such as our student success FLCs, has been well received and has enhanced our team’s learning capabilities and capacities as the program continues to evolve and develop. However, the extent of community goodwill received thus far cannot be taken for granted, and will require additional support, recognition, investment, and legitimacy from senior leadership to remain sustainable.

What we only briefly touched on above is the role of faculty unions in the development and sustainability of programs designed to integrate FYE content into academic courses. Almost all colleges and universities in Canada have full and part-time (or sessional) faculty unions. As mentioned above, there is no question that creating and developing content for these courses takes more work on the part of faculty. Although there are many ways to provide credit for full-time faculty for this additional work, it is not as easy to provide credit for sessional faculty. Perhaps not surprisingly, many collective agreements are quite rigid in terms of how courses are taught and developed and rarely consider the role that staff might have in the development and teaching of components of academic courses. Therefore, it is important that unions work with faculty and staff to find ways to ensure that this type of FYE programming is possible at their institutions.

The Future of FYE Programming

Although it is evident that students, institutions, and society all benefit when student success is enhanced, exactly how the future of FYE programming will develop remains difficult to predict. However, it seems clear that developing a closer connection between curricular and co-curricular approaches to student success would be beneficial for all these prevalent PSE institutional stakeholders. Closer collaboration should ensure a better understanding of the needs of students, and how academics and student affairs professionals can work together to provide that support. In this chapter, we have outlined one approach that can be successful in supporting student success, performance, and retention. Context will likely dictate the most appropriate strategies and approaches for other PSE institutions to follow.  However, moving forward a shared and common denominator in all successful FYS and FYE co-curricular development will rely upon the goodwill and dedication of faculty and academic support staff, in addition to the fundamental and sustainable supports and encouragement provided from institutional leadership.

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