School may be out for some this summer, but other area students will take advantage of new summer learning opportunities.

The State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry will launch an expanded summer session offering more than 30 online, classroom and field-based courses over four terms beginning May 16 and ending Aug. 12.

This year’s summer session will offer courses ranging from ‘Computer Aided Design’ to ‘Food, Culture and the Environment from Garden to Table’ to ‘Introduction to Golf Course Architecture,’ said Charles Spuches, associate provost for outreach. Courses will be open to high school, undergraduate and graduate students from around New York state.

In the past, ESF’s summer program has typically been made of research and courses at the Ranger School in Wanakena, N.Y., and Cranberry Lake Biological Station, Spuches said. Few, if any, courses take place at ESF’s Syracuse campus, Spuches said. The few courses that were offered on Main Campus were usually specified for a particular group of students rather than a broad assortment, he said.

‘What we’re doing now is expanding our offerings to include courses and other experiences that will service a broader range of ESF students and visiting students,’ Spuches said.

The program was first proposed during the 2009-10 academic year, and a small number of courses were offered last summer as a test run. This year will be ESF’s first concerted effort at a full-fledged summer session, Spuches said.

Spuches said ESF’s motivation behind the program was to expand the ways in which the college can support the community and was backed by an enthusiastic response from the faculty.

‘For us it’s a novelty,’ Spuches said. ‘It’s never happened before, but I think it will be the new normal for us.’

Aside from supporting the community, ESF may also be following trends in higher education.

Elizabeth Vidon, an environmental studies instructor who will teach four courses at ESF this summer, said most other universities offer summer classes and ESF may be looking to establish the same practice. She said the summer courses will benefit both professors and students.

Summer classes generally have fewer students, which Vidon said gives her an opportunity to do more interesting lessons and include group activities and assignments that would be difficult in larger classes.

‘Although the pace of the classes tends to be more intense, the atmosphere in the summer always feels a bit more relaxed,’ Vidon said.

Summer courses allow for more continuity and less time wasted on reviewing because classes meet at least four times a week instead of two or three, Vidon said. Students will be able to enroll in classes they otherwise would not have been able to take due to long waitlists, scheduling conflicts or enrollment caps, which could help make the normal academic year better, she said.

‘They can knock out a number of their GenEd or other requirements in the summer so they can spend more time on the courses that interest them the most during the regular academic year,’ Vidon said.

Preston Gilbert, a landscape architecture professor, said along with combating high enrollment, the summer session will allow students to take courses they are personally interested in that may not necessarily fit in with their required courses during the academic year.

Gilbert, who is teaching a summer course called ‘Introduction to Brownfields,’ said he expects to see a good response to the course because he has taught the same course at community colleges and had high enrollment numbers.

Jo Anne Ellis, associate librarian at ESF, said she hopes to see a higher enrollment compared to the trial-run programs from last year. Ellis will teach ‘Information Literacy,’ which is a required course for half of ESF’s undergraduates.

She said she hopes students will take advantage of the summer course, whether those registering for summer classes are college students trying to get ahead for the fall semester or make up classes, or are high school students who have taken part in ESF’s High School Program. 

‘Who knows,’ Ellis said, ‘we may even lure a few SU students over.’

jlsiart@syr.edu

Published on April 3, 2011 at 12:00 pm