Town Hall at Wilkes-Barre

On February 21, 2012, the Wilkes-Barre campus held a town hall meeting on instructional space.  There were four students, five faculty members and two staff members present.

They responded to the three questions we have asked at each Town Hall meeting:

  1. What elements of the current model work?
  2. What challenges have you encountered with the current scheduling model?
  3. What should Penn State’s top 5 priorities be?

The issue of advising seems to have been central to the discussion at Wilkes-Barre.  Students there mostly commute, so there are issues of scheduling associated with the need for students to juggle full-time class schedules and part-time job schedules.

Here are the priorities they established:

  1. Make advising more intrusive and more accessible. Students need to realize the importance of advising from day one because if they get out of sequence with course scheduling, this can extend their time in college.
  2. First-Year Seminar – students and faculty strongly support the FYS courses and feel they could address some of the advising issues and keep students on track with their academic progress.
  3. More creative scheduling –more hybrid or blended learning courses.
  4. Technology should be incorporated into every curriculum and used as a supplement for the traditional face-to-face course offerings.
  5. Cost-cutting should NOT be the driving force behind scheduling of classes. Offering a class two times/week as opposed to three times/week should be for pedagogical reasons, not convenience of faculty or finances of the commuter.
  6. We should collaborate with neighboring campuses to allow Wilkes-Barre students to travel to Worthington Scranton and vice versa, to get a needed course. Also, Polycom is a creative technology that can be used more.

Thoughts and comments are welcome.

Thanks to Margie Esopi for submitting the notes from this meeting.

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