First Year Seminar targets five goals, each associated with specific course outcomes. These outcomes take the form of specific knowledge, skills, and attitudes. They may be achieved in a classroom, the traditional university venue, or outside the classroom in everyday life.
Academic communities are defined by sets of behaviors, activities, and histories. They are composed of people who study, do research, and perform analyses. They are located, in part, on campuses, in classrooms, in institutions. These communities are sometimes less informal than everyday life, with sanctioned approaches, strategies, and methods. They have their own sets of acceptable and accepted arguments, evidence, and proof.
Students explain a general concept of an academic community and compare it to other communities.
Students use CSUMB’s Vision and core values to define what is unique about the CSUMB academic community.
Students identify the type of classroom activities, experiences, and environments that best support their learning, development, and participation in an academic community.
Students can explain their roles and responsibilities as students in an academic community.
Outcomes based education is one of the fundamental aspects of CSUMB’s academic mission. An outcome is an observable, measurable product or process that can be accomplished by taking a course or through life and work experience. Each major has established a set of Major Learning Outcomes and many courses have specified Course Learning Outcomes.
Students can describe outcomes-based education and identify how outcomes support their learning.
CSUMB’s programs do not sound like traditional university programs. For example, there is no English or biology department. Still, students learn the material associated with English departments—composition, rhetoric, reading different literatures, etc.—in Human Communication and learn biology in Earth Systems Science & Policy. The General Education required in all California State Universities has been reimagined as CSUMB’s University Learning Requirements. Rather than a single area focus, these University Learning Requirements have interdisciplinary connections. They also embody CSUMB's core values and the ideals of the Vision Statement.
Students see how professionals in disciplines think and work by investigating the theoretical and conceptual frameworks of six campus programs.
Students make informed decisions for their Individual Learning Plans covering their first two years of study.
The USA is a society made up of many groups of people with different cultures, ethnic backgrounds, abilities, races, religions, incomes, sexual orientations, educations, from different regions, with different genders, different languages, and other characteristics. Every member of our society lives in this complex world. It is important to discover our own perspectives and those of other people. This goal investigates social identity and group membership, and looks at socialization. Students gain some understanding of the concept of culture, explore how cultures differ, and think about what global community might mean.
Students describe their social and cultural identities in terms of their origins, life histories, and current relationships, understanding that these identities can be fluid.
Students express conceptual definitions of multiculturalism and diversity, and identify implications of multiculturalism for their roles in this academic community.
When asked why they have come to college, students often respond, “To get educated.” Still, what does education mean? Students think about and define personal desires for education, identifying what it means to broaden perspectives, to become a larger person, a more informed citizen. Higher education in the USA has two goals: expanding students’ understanding of themselves and the world, as well as preparing them for the workplace.
Students assess themselves to determine possible academic pathways and career decisions.
Students describe what it means to be a knowledgeable and responsible citizen.
Revised 3/4/05