Teaching Final Year Students
Helping Students make Transitions
Although an important concern for university courses designers is considering the transitional needs of first year students, another less well attended transitional concern is preparing final year students for the next step in their career, whether it be in the workplace or further study. Courses ought not be a collection of atomic subjects bundled together to add up to enough credit points to make a degree, but a coherent series of learning experiences that builds onto what has preceded, draws from students' concurrent learning and experiences and prepares the way for what is to come.
The focus of this website is to consider what might be the objectives in designing the learning experiences for the final year of study.
In the United States some universities have introduced what they call "capstone" courses. The aptly named term "capstone" is the critical piece in the plan that holds the structure together to give it form. Dr Bet Roffey from the School of Commerce has taught in such programs in the US and has designed her own version in a final semester in the Master of International Business Administration here at Flinders University. Teaching Final Year Students Using 'CAPSTONE' Topics is a website developed on this issue.
In
addition, Professor Iain Hay has considered how students can prepare
themselves to make the transition. Using a Flinders
University Innovations grant, he developed resources to assist
students in generating a portfolio
of generic skills gained in completing discipline-specific topics.
To assist students in their successful negotiations of these transition the design of the learning experiences needs to change across the years requiring increasing:
- complexity
- application
- ambiguity
- commitment to ideas
- authenticity
- collaboration
- evaluation
