Lauren Taylor spent the last half of May knocking out an elective course in her major, which she needs for her anticipated December graduation from the University of Arkansas.
“I have extra time this summer,” she said Friday, one week after finals, an “A” under her belt. “I thought, why not?”
Typically, a Fayetteville campus course stretches 15 weeks during a fall or spring semester and five weeks during a summer session.
But under the university’s new, super-condensed “ intersession” offering, students like Taylor are now able to fast-track a course here and there.
It allows students to pack in a short burst of coursework featuring longer class times or laboratory hours - with an eye toward accelerating them toward graduation, those familiar with the concept have said.
The May 2013 intersession began May 13.
The two weeks of classes included 10 class days that ended May 23, with finals on May 24.
UA Provost Sharon Gaber estimated the intersession offered just over 60 classes.
“I have heard general satisfaction with our inaugural intersession,” she said Friday by e-mail.
Fiona M. Davidson, an associate professor in UA’s geosciences department, was among the first group of professors to try the expedited format, teaching human geography, a requirement for geography majors.
“This is perfect,” Davidson said in an interview Thursday, referring to the course’s suitability for intersession. It covers the earth’s changing demographics.
“This is a survey class: It’s not problem-oriented. It’s nothomework-oriented.”
In a traditional semester, Davidson will teach 11 chapters in 15 weeks at a pace of about 2 hours and 15 minutes per week.
With intersession’s 4 hours of class daily, she said, “you’re doing a week and a half a day.”
Taylor, 22, a senior from McKinney, Texas, who’s studying broadcast journalism, said that’s the top advantage of a fast class, but also might be the only potential downside.
“The only thing that bothered me was that, if you were to miss just one day - it would be like missing a month of class,” said Taylor, who took a class titled “Performer in Mass Media,” an upper-level journalism elective.
Her journalism professor accelerated the course evenfurther, so students didn’t have to come in on a Saturday at the end of the first week as originally scheduled, Taylor said.
Taylor said she would recommend the intersession to other students:
“I honestly, I loved it. Just because you got so much information in 10 days.”
Davidson said students’ reasons for needing an accelerated course included an apartment lease ending in May and some study-abroad plans prohibiting a five-week summer course.
Janine Parry, the incoming president of UA’s Faculty Senate, said she is interested in trying her hand at an intersession course.
“I was neutral on the idea to start,” Parry said.
It would involve overhauling a core course she teaches - American national government - which she first designed 15 years ago and has occasionally updated but not overhauled.
Adults typically have a 15-minute attention span in traditional lectures, she said, so a 4-hour intersession course would need more interruptions of short video, quizzes or class discussions.
But Parry said that’s something she wants to do with her traditional classes anyway, and online and intersession formats are a welcome push.
“It’s going to force us to move a little further away from the sage-on-the-stage approach,”she said.
Gaber said the university will be flexible in working out the kinks.
“We need to tweak and coordinate our classroom availability-opening for finals and need to look at how best to administer our course evaluations for faculty feedback,” added Gaber, who also is UA’s chief academic officer. “We will continue to work on these things to make it an even better learning atmosphere in the future.”
She noted that when her office and the university’s Faculty Senate worked together to design parameters for the intersession and its implementation, they viewed it as another avenue to complete a course through intensive study.
The next intersessions are in early August, early January 2014 and May 2014.
UA was not the first Arkansas campus to try the accelerated courses, officials have said previously.
Fayetteville campus students sometimes have contended with a shortage of course offerings when they need them.
This can happen with a prerequisite for a future course. Or, they sometimes find that a crucial course is offered only once a year. These problems can delay graduation.
As Parry put it: “It’s just another option for students to either get ahead, or get back on track.”
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 11 on 06/01/2013