FRO (Freshman Orientation)

For the benefit of those who were not able to attend today's IS Division meeting, I thought I'd recap what Aisha Peña had to say about the library's participation in the FRO (Freshman Orientation) program. I've also added in some additional info from the Baruch web site.

First, according to the Baruch faculty handbook, FRE is:

A required 12-week non-credit course for freshmen...[that] offers students an opportunity to engage in the Baruch community during the initial, and sometimes unsettling, first semester on campus. Led by a faculty or staff member and a trained upperclassman, freshmen seminars provide information about college life and the College. The program helps students learn and adopt methods to be successful in college. Structured class exercises encourage participation and provide an avenue for interactions with the students. Seminar leaders play a vital role in helping students adjust and in influencing their educational objectives.

This fall, there will be close to 2000 freshmen in FRO seminars. Starting in the next week or so, they will be taking the "New Students Library Tutorial" by following these steps:

1. With the instruction sheet provided to them by the instructors in their FRO sections (we have extra copies at the reference desk), the students will come pick up three paper handouts from the library (#1 is at the reference desk, #2 is at the circulation desk, and #3 is at the 3rd floor service desk) and one electonic handout (#4) that is available as a PDF via a link on the Ask a Librarian page of the library web site.
2. After getting the handouts, students will log into Blackboard, go to the FRO course page (students in the Learning Communities will see a course labeled "2006 Freshman Learning Communities" and everyone else will see "All Fro 1000 Fall 2006"), click the appropriate course listing, then click "Assignments" on the FRO page, and take the quiz.
3. Students must get an 80 on the quiz for it to count as successfully completed. Students may retake it as many times as they need to.

If a student reports being locked out of the quiz (i.e., the student can get into Blackboard and onto the Assignments page with the quiz but they can't actually launch the quiz), then tell them that the problem will be fixed by the next day (we have to manually "unlock" those quizzes that have been so frozen and will do so on a daily basis).

A smaller subset of students in the FRO seminars are part of the Learning Communities, which the faculty handbook describes as follows:

Faculty who participate in Learning Communities build on the advantages of block programming by highlighting intellectual links between courses and by scheduling co-curricular activities that complement course material. In a Baruch learning community, faculty members develop their courses collaboratively and confer regularly with each other and with their students, both in person and on line.They also create a range of other activities that supplement in-class instruction, increase engagement, and reinforce the collegial ideal of students and faculty working together on the common project of education.

The Learning Communities sections of FRO have to do a second tutorial and quiz:

1. In the "Assignments" section of their FRO course page in Blackboard, students should look for a link for the "Newman Library Help" tutorial (the direct URL for this is http://newman.baruch.cuny.edu/help/tutorial/home.htm)
2. After reviewing the tutorial, they should go back to Blackboard and do the "Exercise" that is linked to on the Assignments page (it's another Blackboard quiz).

As with the quiz for the "New Students Library Orientation," students may find themselves locked out of the quiz (particuarly if they abandon the quiz without completing it). Just tell students in this situation that the quiz will be unlocked by the next business day.

If you have further comments or clarifications, please post a comment to this blog entry. If you have further questions, you may want to contact Aisha Peña directly.