Contextualized Curriculum

Curricular interventions that aim to introduce new content, particularly content from a different discipline, face many challenges. Undergraduate curriculum is often saturated and adding new content will generally lead to an increase in the number of hours a student needs to graduate. Service courses that aim to provide basic STEM skills can also be limiting as they are generally designed with a one-size-fits-all mindset and thus may not deliver the right content for all majors. Given the demands of STEM skills by disciplines across the university, it is generally not possible to scale these courses to the appropriate level with the limited faculty resources of a single department. To be successful in their disciplinary efforts many STEM-X majors require more advanced knowledge and skills than what is offered in an introductory course. Because STEM curriculum is heavily pre-requisite driven, students from other majors are often not able to enroll in certain upper- division courses that they need. To address the above challenges, and building on our prior efforts, we have developed a flexible and scalable approach of curricular intervention which will establish new STEM concentrations at our disciplines. Our strategy consists of three tiers.

Foundation courses: The first tier of the intervention will introduce three foundational courses on technology, programming and algorithmic thinking, and data science. The courses will be open to all students at TXST as they require no pre-requisites in Computer Science or Data Science. We are re-designing existing courses and contextualizing them for STEM-X students. 

Intermediate modules: The second tier includes systematic integration of modules on data and computation topics that are relevant to the three disciplines: Agriculture, Health Information, and Mass Communication. STEM-X program faculty, in collaboration with industry stakeholders, will identify specific STEM competencies for their graduates, including data mining and visualization, cloud computing, machine learning, neural networks, big data, Python programming and more. Each competency will then be mapped to a discipline specific course where it can be immediately applied in a practical context. Once the mapping is in place, a module will be developed for each competency taking into consideration the desired proficiency level. Context will be leveraged when possible in integrating modules into an existing course. To encourage wider adoption, the modules will be designed to be short and self-contained, including videos, tutorials, summative and formative assessment material, grading rubrics and assignment solutions, and a set of well-defined learning outcomes. 

Inter-disciplinary capstone and research: The third tier of the intervention - an upper-level capstone course - will provide STEM-X students with opportunities to conduct interdisciplinary research and demonstrate their understanding of STEM concepts, while also promoting retention and persistence. An existing course in the target discipline will be designated as a STEM-X capstone. To facilitate the STEM-X capstone program, we will collaborate with the IDEA Center, creating a pool of STEM and STEM-X faculty interested in supervising interdisciplinary student research. We will organize events that will allow STEM-X concentration students to meet and interact with research faculty.