Forum Conversations: Preview Night and various thoughts

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

HSAC UHP Town Hall: Preview Night Improvement

Town Hall Test Run

HSAC's new committee, the Honors Student Action Group a.k.a. HSAG, is all about making changes on campus that benefit UHP students and the UNM community. HSAG is in the process of organizing a 'Town Hall' for honors students. This town hall would offer honors students the opportunity to voice their opinions and influence change within the honors program. The first thing that HSAG would like to tackle is UHP's Preview Night, so they centered the 'Town Hall Test Run' around that topic. We all know that honors students have long complained about preview night and it's inconveniences, so HSAG is going to try and improve the format of Preview Night and remind honors students that it really is an awesome event and privilege that is unique to the honors program. At this test run town hall meeting HSAC members discussed what preview night is, the goals of preview night, whether or not preview night is currently reaching those goals, possible improvements to preview night, and ways to implement these improvements. HSAG will be announcing the first UHP wide town hall meeting in the next few weeks. If you think that this is something you think you'd like to participate in look out for the meeting announcement on the UHP list-serve and flyers in the forum.

Monday, September 14, 2009

A Preview Night Debate

One, two, three, four: I declare a debate war!

Other Honors Colleges across the U.S. who also have Banner are experimenting with year-long scheduling, meaning that each March (for example) students register for their Fall, Summer AND Spring classes.

So this post is two-pronged. Presidents and Provosts at these campuses say it will help them provide better course offerings (more of what students want) and more sections of what students need. To me, it feelsl ike going into the grocery store and buying everything I'll need for the next year for which the store manager will then make better selections for when I come back (in 365 days)...but if what I need is not one shelf, how would I ever buy it? So I'm curious if UNM ever moved in this direction (and I'm not saying we will as UNM tends to do things differently from the rest of the country), would this be helpful to anyone making their schedules?

My other thought directly relates to Honors on a year-long schedule. Every semester we have Preview Night so that students and faculty can come together as a community and get a look ahead at the next semester's courses. It takes about 2 hours to go through 1 semester of courses (with each teacher speaking for a max of 2 minutes!). So if we were on a year-long schedule, we could then presume Preview Night would take 4-5 hours!!! Holy Cow! Thus I open up the topic of Preview Night for a fun hypothetical debate. If you, the UHP student reading this post, were the new "Dr. O-director" of Honors, what would you do with Preview Night? Put teacher presentations online for students to watch whenever? Do away with it completely? Span it over 2 days? This is all hypothetical. Pretend there are no limits to technology or money.

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