2022 Cohort
8
edits
Changes
Added Strategic Priority #8.4
There are, of course, issues regarding this aim. For example, depending on who holds access to what has been decided to be a webpage could matter a lot in terms of what gets done and what does not. Also whether this webpage is used at all whether by the faculty or the students in incredibly important. Finally, what sort of responses and engagement this webpage receives is also super important because a bunch of college kids posting unproductive criticism of their school to the administration does not seem conducive towards a healthy, productive environment and I don't want response bias.
So, over these past six weeks, how has my idea developed? Well, in short the answer is extensively. Not only has our team created a prototype that has been tested on students and will continue to be developed in order to properly address the aforementioned issues, but we have also learned a ton more about what it means to socially innovate on a college campus. So in summary, both our ideas and how project has developed, and in the future we plan on continuing this growth by utilizing the design thinking process.
<span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: 11pt; font-weight: 700; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="background-color:#ffffe0;">Strategic Priority #8.2 (Trinh Nguyen 2022): Pre-college courses</span></span></span>
Methods: Create pre-college level courses. It is challenging to put into place extra courses - most colleges already suffer from the lack of faculty to teach required classes. Therefore, I propose that Swarthmore provide pre-college level courses that students can take remotely. This can be in the form of subscriptions to online courses or in-person evening classes led by upperclassmen. For the online courses, students can opt into taking them over the break before the main course. During the semester, the in-person evening classes help provide additional support for struggling students. A lot of pre-class materials are usually trivial, like navigating a tool, refreshing on learned concepts, etc. Therefore, these pre-college courses will not be too much of a burden on students, and won’t be counted as credits.
Stakeholders: The STEM faculty, Registrar, and students (upperclassmen as teachers, and underclassmen as students).
<span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: 11pt; font-weight: 700; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="background-color:#ffffe0;">Strategic Priority #8.3 (Ari Mosqueda 2022): Resource Navigation for FLI Students</span></span></span>
The stakeholders for this project would include the Swat FLI staff (Dean Karen Henry, Jasmine Owens, and Rosemary Tourish), as well as the head staff from the academic and career support programs such as Career Services and Academic Advising. Student feedback from both those who have felt they have adequately navigated Swarthmore’s resources, as well as those who felt they haven’t, would also be extremely important to this project. A constraint of this project could arise in measuring how well resources are being used, but ultimately qualitative feedback from surveys (about students’ experiences) could help us overcome this obstacle.
<span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: 11pt; font-weight: 700; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="background-color:#ffffe0;">'''Strategic Priority #8.4 (Hojune Kim 2022): Swarthmore Student-centric Course Scheduler'''</span></span></span>
I believe that the most fundamental right of students is to learn what they want. But over decades, higher educational institutions have ignored these basic rights by releasing their next semester’s course schedule without listening to their student population. As a result, most students have to drop one or more classes that they originally wanted to take due to the course conflict. This phenomenon applies regardless of country.
Our SSCS get surveys from the students on their top 4 courses that they want to take for the next semester. Also, SSCS takes surveys from the faculties about their available time for lectures, and by combining these two, SSCS finds the optimal schedule that both minimizes the course conflict and fits the possible schedule of the faculties. Programming the approximate scheduling algorithm is expected to be the most challenging part of this project, but convincing faculties and administration offices can be possible obstacles as well.
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