By Dennis O’Neil
As the change from high school to college remains difficult for many incoming students, the STOMP modules, online tutorial programs, have helped ease the transition.
The success surrounding the modules, which the University of Louisville was the first to undertake, has prompted praise from students and other universities and a push into Phase 2 of development, which entails mailing DVD versions to incoming freshmen in July.
STOMP, which stands for student tutorial online module program, are online videos that provide important information to incoming freshmen and transfer students, helping to guide them in the earliest days at U of L.
The modules have been shown almost everywhere at U of L from classrooms to the Board of Trustees meeting. They cover topics such as faculty-student interaction, campus academic services and technological resources for students.
Many modules present characters and story lines that address typical collegiate problems, such as how to deal with missing a class or studying for a test and provide useful tips on how to deal with these situations.
Thus far, many in the student body have found the modules very useful. Third year theater student James Cronin, who acted in several modules, said that students recognize him from the videos and tell him how helpful they were.
“[The modules] take a lot of stuff that is vital to the collegiate experience and present it in such a way that is very engaging and doesn’t put the student to sleep,” said Cronin.
“I really enjoyed [the modules] and they weren’t that boring either,” said freshman undeclared student Jillian Watts. “They helped me understand a lot more about stuff like where to find help with homework and the proper etiquette in approaching professors.”
Even though the modules are geared toward freshmen, senior communication major Tracy Lightfoot, who worked on the modules, said that upperclassmen can benefit from them as well.
“I transferred to U of L and was not required to take GEN 101, so I was never exposed to a lot of information,” said Lightfoot. “The modules helped make me more receptive to many of my general educational requirements, which I balked at having to take early on.”
The modules have also been very useful to faculty. Early in the semester, psychology professor Dr. Edna Ross showed a module about faculty-student interaction to one of her classes. Ross said it helped her students in learning how to behave during lectures.
“After teaching for so many years, I got the sense that students thought that their behavior was invisible in lectures because there are so many people around them,” Ross said. “The module helped send a message of what is expected in class, and that they are not anonymous.”
U of L Provost Shirley Willihnganz said that the modules were developed in order to provide a common core of knowledge to incoming students, regardless of their academic program.
“We thought that there should be a common set of experiences that every student [at U of L] should have,” Willihnganz said. “We also wanted the information to be fun and available to students when it was convenient for them.”
According to Janet Spence, director of Undergraduate Advising Practices, the creation of the modules represented an unprecedented collaboration from within the university. Over 100 people worked on the project, forming six different committees to create the content of each module. The committees included academic advising professionals, information technology personnel and staff from the Delphi Center for Teaching and Learning.
“The Delphi Center spent and incredible amount of time on the project,” Spence said. “They were responsible for the creative development of each module, and provided the production work of editing, animation and some script writing.”
“[The Delphi Center staff] learned to film, edit, create Flash environments and animate cartoon characters-all in a couple of months,” said Lightfoot. “I hope that students appreciate the work that went into the project.”
U of L has received much praise in the broader academic community for the modules, said assistant university provost Gale Rhodes. According to Rhodes, U of L is the first school to undertake a project like this.
“In fact, several schools have inquired about the possibility of attaining help to create something like this for their institution,” Rhodes said.
“Whenever I show the module on faculty-student interaction to my colleagues from other institutions, they always ask me where they can get a copy so that they can show it to their students,” Ross said.
Despite all praise, Christy Metzger, the current coordinator of the project from the Office of Undergraduate Affairs, said that there are still plenty of things to improve as the modules move into Phase 2.
“We want to try to get student input at the front end of phase two,” said Metzger. “We got some great feedback from student actors or student interns who worked on the project along the way, but we’d like to get student input at every planning session for the modules.”
Metzger also said they are planning to mail DVDs containing modules to incoming freshmen over the summer, making it more accessible to students who do not have high speed Internet. “We think that this idea is well worth the financial investment that it will take to make it happen,” Metzger said.
According to Spence, Undergraduate Practices is planning to make Phase 2 available to incoming freshmen by July 2007. Existing modules can be viewed at http://www.s4.louisville.edu/stomp.
“With any pilot program, you learn from experience,” Spence said. “We know what worked well and what did not and what we need to improve in Phase 2. Overall though, we are pleased with what we were able to deliver to students.”
