A first for first-year Bobcats

“My first year was kind of a rocky transition,” Hunt says. “I’m a first-generation college student, and I’ve always struggled with homesickness.”

What made the difference for Hunt and kept her, as a first-year student, on the path to graduation? OHIO’s Learning Communities.

“My Learning Community really changed so much about how I looked at my college experience,” Hunt says. “It’s one of the things that really helped me find my footing at OU and feel comfortable here.”

For more than two decades, OHIO’s Learning Community Programs have played a fundamental role in helping first-year Bobcats transition from home and high school to their new home away from home at Ohio University and in Athens.

“Our Learning Communities pick up right where Bobcat Student Orientation (BSO) leaves off,” explains Kris Kumfer, BFA ’97, MED ’04, director of OHIO’s Learning Community Programs, which are housed, along with BSO, in the Office of First-Year and Student Transitions. “It’s all about student transition and what our first-year students need to know in order to be successful academically and connected socially.”

According to Kumfer, the success of Learning Communities lies in its three components:

• Learning Community Leaders (LCL), OHIO undergraduates who facilitate out-of-the-classroom activities among first-year Bobcats placed in a Learning Community specific to their major or another shared experience, like those enrolled in the University’s ROTC programs
• A common seminar course where first-year students get acquainted with the expectations of their college or major while engaging with a faculty or staff member from that area
• And cluster classes, courses that members of a Learning Community take as a cohort, fulfilling academic requirements while building friendships

“We know the combination of those three things is critical to first-year student engagement and success,” Kumfer says.

For as long as the Learning Community Programs have existed, they’ve been rooted in in-person interactions. That is, until this past year.

The COVID-19 pandemic robbed many members of OHIO’s Class of 2024 of their high school graduation ceremonies. It meant they had their first experiences as official Bobcats at Ohio University through a virtual BSO. And it meant that they would experience OHIO’s Learning Communities in a way no other Bobcats ever had.

“In some ways, nothing changed, but everything changed,” Kumfer says of how the Learning Community Programs pivoted to serve first-year students who started their OHIO journeys from their homes. “Our structure didn’t change, but how we did it—everything—changed in some ways.”

The more than 3,000 first-year students who participated in OHIO’s Learning Communities last fall had an entirely online experience. It was a feat that required training for the program’s 200-plus instructors, synchronizing of its seminar courses to bring students together virtually at the same time, and—perhaps most importantly and challenging—creativity to develop out-of-classroom programming essential to facilitating Bobcat connections.

“We were trying really hard to get them to form that same sense of community with each other that we made with our peers,” Hunt says.

Hunt has served as a BSO leader for the past three years and this year decided to also serve as a Learning Community Leader, inspired by the LCL who helped her through her struggles as a first-year student.

“When I was in my Learning Community, it was easy to commiserate with each other,” Hunt remembers. “We were all in the same room most of the time. We were doing the same homework assignments all at the same time, taking the same exams, doing all of those things. And being actually present in those classes together made commiserating so easy. That’s been a little harder to do virtually.”

To help this year’s LCLs, the Learning Community Programs collaborated with OHIO’s Office of Information Technology to create, through Microsoft Teams, 185 LC Hangouts, an online home base for each Learning Community to be together and socialize outside of the learning environment.

“We do everything from study sessions there. We did fine arts events. We did Welcome Week activities,” Kumfer says of the LC Hangouts. “We need to be apart a little bit to be safe, but we also need to be connected to be healthy, socially and interpersonally. There’s something about being in the same room with other Bobcats that these students are craving, and we tried to bring as much of the community to them as possible.”

In her weekly LC Hangouts, Hunt shared perspectives on her struggles, as both a first-year student and even as a senior navigating online classes, and hosted homework sessions.

“Those have been really helpful,” she says, “especially because that has been one of the biggest things that we are all struggling with right now—staying on top of our schoolwork from home.”

Hunt admits that getting the students to interact and connect was a challenge.

“Some of these online activities are just not appealing to students after they’ve spent all day on their laptop,” she says. “And they’re still at home. They still have all of their high school friends in the same town as them. They still have all of their support system, so they’re not struggling to find or develop a new one.”

Hunt found success in getting students to socialize through Netflix watch parties and by playing Among Us, an online multiplayer game that relies on teamwork. Among Us was a particular hit, she says, generating great student turnout and even getting one of her students, who spent the first half of the semester off-camera and mostly silent, engaging and talking the whole time.

“The most rewarding part has been when students do get involved,” Hunt says.

The Learning Community Programs also collaborated with OHIO Housing and Residence Life, partnering each LCL with a remote resident assistant (RA) who joined the LC Hangouts three times during the semester. During those sessions, RAs talked to the students about the loss they were feeling by not being on campus, shared information about leadership opportunities and how to get involved, and prepared them to transition to life on campus.

While in a normal year Learning Communities end after the first semester, this is not a normal year. Some aspects of the Learning Community Programs are continuing spring semester since that’s when most first-year students started their on-campus OHIO experience.

Those LCL-RA partnerships have been flipped with new Learning Community student ambassadors, who served as LCLs and BSO leaders, attending Residence Life staff meetings to hear about how first-year students are adapting to life on campus and better understand how they can help. The Learning Communities’ seminar courses continue to be offered to first-year students who opted to postpone starting their OHIO experience for a semester. And those student ambassadors are still helping to connect first-year students, leading tours of campus facilities and engaging in small group activities—all with COVID-19 safety protocols in mind.

“It’s not like our students chose to have COVID as their experience their freshman year,” Kumfer says. “It has defined us as a community this year, but it doesn’t mean we can’t still grow and we can’t still connect. … That’s what Bobcats are really good at—networking, connecting and making a difference. That’s what this year has been all about for our students, our instructors, our LCLs, our professional staff and our graduate assistants.”

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