Supporting Students with Faculty Learning Communities at University of South Alabama

As a public regional institution, the University of South Alabama (USA) serves a large number of students who are the first in their family to attend college. These students are building skills and confidence to navigate college, including a close reading of a syllabus and proactively managing due dates.

Supporting students through their first two years in college has been a focus for Lisa LaCross, the Associate Director of Faculty Development at USA’s Innovation and Learning Center. Since joining in 2020, she’s been building faculty learning communities (FLCs) to further develop a culture of teaching inquiry, particularly as part of USA’s first- and second-year experience programs. Much of their discussion is about how large-enrollment gateway courses that first- and second-year students take can make or break their experience in college.

In spring 2025, Nicole Carr, the AVP of Student Academic Success, asked LaCross to participate in the Association of Public & Land-grant Universities (APLU)’s Flexible Learning Environments for Improved Student Success training in spring of 2025 and to develop an FLC based on it LaCross saw that as an opportunity to help the university’s incoming students transition more seamlessly. The course is one of the menu of professional development programs available through Every Learner Everywhere® and delivered by partners like APLU.

The cohort taking Flexible Learning Environments for Improved Student Success consisted of eight faculty from different disciplines. LaCross broke that cohort into two smaller groups and set up study halls where the faculty would get together before their training and coaching sessions to do the assignments as a group.

Because gateway courses look very different in each department, the small group study halls allowed faculty to learn from each other and trade ideas across disciplines. “Faculty members would take the instructional practices and apply them to their own unique situation in their departments,” LaCross says.

Along with facilitating the study halls, LaCross kept everyone on track with emailed reminders and updates. She also used a spreadsheet provided by the course facilitator for collaborative notetaking and to share information on each training and coaching session, using multiple tabs to keep everything organized in one place.

“And our coach, Julian, did a phenomenal job walking us through all the steps of planning our initiative and planning our next steps,” LaCross says.

Putting a plan in action

Together, the cohort explored practices to support first-year students’ transition into college, as well as student progression through major-specific gateway courses. Students coming from high school are likely used to their teachers giving them study guides and telling them when the due dates are, says LaCross. Additionally, they may not be accustomed to the amount of content covered in a college semester.

The challenge is to help new students understand college-level academic expectations by building them into the assignment structure of gateway courses, while also offering multiple opportunities for practice and feedback prior to a high stakes assessment. The cohort worked on using transparent and frequent assignments at the beginning of the course to give students practice and let them know what to expect on the larger assignments. The ultimate goal is to support students by adding transparent assessment practices within the first four weeks of the larger courses.

One outcome of the APLU training is a plan to survey instructors of first- and second-year courses to better understand the landscape of how and when they’re assigning work to students and how students are performing. LaCross will share that survey with department chairs and incorporate feedback to launch the revised survey during the fall term.

Next, they’ll create a pilot group of instructors and turn it into an FLC, so faculty can work together to create a plan for administering frequent assignments and including transparent assignments in their courses. That FLC will meet during the semester to track student success on those assignments, providing real-time data to allow them to pivot in the moment.

Once the pilot group has concluded, the next step will be to get more gateway courses to use the new assignments.

An eye to future projects

While they worked toward their main objective, LaCross and the faculty participating in Flexible Learning Environments for Improved Student Success also learned other practices to incorporate individually. For example, one business faculty member walked away very enthusiastic about self-assessments, says LaCross. Over the summer, he tested self-assessments as his way of driving students to the rubric and getting them to understand how he was grading them, then shared his findings with the FLC.

Another potential project in the future would be to develop a more consistent learning environment across sequential courses to improve student outcomes and persistence into third- and fourth-year courses in their major. “We need to attack that at some point,” says LaCross.

For now, the team at USA is staying focused on their first- and second-year student support efforts.

“Even though the training was several months ago, I’m still going back to the plan we made and thinking about who and what needs to be included,” says LaCross. “It was really helpful to map that out.”