Low stakes, high impact

How Wicked Problems, Wolfpack Solutions transforms the incoming student experience

Abstract

Track: Student Success & Wellness

In the summer of 2024, the design team for the course Wicked Problems, Wolfpack Solutions (WPWS) realized that we had created something special. End-of-course surveys revealed that over 80% of the incoming first-year and transfer students who completed WPWS gained a “new perspective about learning at the undergraduate level,” “felt more connected” with the NC State University than before, and believed the course was “an effective bridge from [their] last school to learning” at NC State. One student commented, “The class taught me much more, such as to seek out truth, to not be caught up in stock stories, then use the real stories to bring justice to the world.”

We might hope to get these kinds of quotes from a student or two in a traditional first-year seminar, where small groups of students meet to discuss interesting topics in real time with a professor or mentor. But WPWS is a massive, online, asynchronous 5-week course taught by just 2 instructors and offered to thousands of students at a time. In this presentation, we will introduce the course to attendees and discuss with them the design elements that are key to the success of this endeavor.  

WPWS is a 2-credit, fully online, largely self-paced course made available for free to all incoming students in the few weeks before they start their first semester at NC State. That amounts to 7000+ students who might complete the course prior to a fall term, and 1000+ students prior to a spring term. WPWS was originally created for students who would enter their first semester at NC State in the midst of a pandemic. We anticipated these students may experience less excitement about starting college and feel challenged to create a home at NC State, so we developed this course as a “virtual hug” to welcome them to our community as well as an exciting introduction to the innovative problem-solving being done by faculty and students at our university. We have continued to offer a version of this course for every incoming group of students since.

The content of WPWS centers around a global and multi-faceted “wicked problem." Since 2020 we’ve covered themes that include public health, pandemics, food supply, and climate change. Although the “wicked problem” we focus on changes, the overall course goals do not. They are:

1. Interdisciplinarity. We want students to explore how faculty and other experts from a wide variety of disciplines offer valuable, evidence-based perspectives and solutions to the wicked problems of the world, and envision the contributions they themselves can make.
2. Transition. We hope to help students discover and develop skills, strategies and relationships needed to thrive in college and beyond.
3. Intentionality. We encourage students to reflect on how to make informed, value- and goal-driven decisions about their own university experience to help guide decisions about majors, minors, courses, and co-curricular experiences.
4. Community. We want students to see themselves and others as valuable, contributing and cared-for members of the university family and identify where and how they can connect with experiences and with other people to develop their own sense of belonging.

Session goals

Attendees to this session can expect to:

• Explore how Universal Design for Learning principles contribute to the success of WPWS
• Consider how low-stakes but meaningful assessment strategies make the course feasible for instructors and also meaningful for students
• Investigate the course structure for ways to interweave stand-alone content from multiple disciplines and student-focused content into a cohesive whole
• Review student survey results and analyze how course design helps successfully accomplish our four course goals. 

Audience participation

Those who attend our session will receive anonymous guest access to a version of the course in our learning management system. Attendees will enter a guided exploration of the course as a student and experience and discuss the design principles that we believe have made the course a success. We hope to encourage generation of ideas that may be applicable to other courses, universities, and student populations relevant to attendees’ own priorities.