Welcome to College Success Concise, an OpenStax resource. This textbook was written to increase student access to high-quality learning materials, maintaining highest standards of academic rigor at little to no cost.
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College Success Concise is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY) license, which means that you can distribute, remix, and build upon the content, as long as you provide attribution to OpenStax and its content contributors.
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Art Attribution in College Success Concise
In College Success Concise, most art contains attribution to its title, creator or rights holder, host platform, and license within the caption. For art that is openly licensed, anyone may reuse the art as long as they provide the same attribution to its original source. Some art has been provided through permissions and should only be used with the attribution or limitations provided in the credit. If art contains no attribution credit, it may be reused without attribution.
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Format
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About College Success Concise
College Success Concise is designed to meet the course needs of a variety of courses, workshops, or seminars for first-year experience or college transition students. FYE programs vary greatly according to institution, so this briefer version of the original College Success textbook has been developed to provide the most flexibility possible for course coordinators, instructors, and instructional designers. The open license and multiple formats provide many opportunities to tailor the material to meet program-specific needs.
College Success and College Success Concise address the evolving challenges and opportunities of today's diverse students. The intensive development work leveraged expertise from hundreds of FYE coordinators and faculty across the country. In particular, this Concise version was crafted with the input of dozens of course coordinators and faculty who used the original text in a variety of contexts, including one-credit seminars and summer bridge programs. The topics have been carefully chosen to prioritize the most critical topics in those briefer course offerings, and the authors have organized them to create a logical and reinforcing flow. While much of the material is very similar to the original College Success book, this version was holistically edited and updated where needed. Users will see distinctive improvements and additions in certain areas, such as a new section on group work and greatly expanded coverage of stress, social media, and wellbeing.
While some content was removed in creating this derivative, our open license and platform allow instructors and students to reliably utilize content from the original College Success text. As with all of our books, instructors can link to individual textbook sections or utilize the various means of customization.
College Success Concise shares the vision and approach of the original textbook, and is rooted in core values of motivation, growth mindset, student support, and equity. The material highlights resources available to students as they embark on new roads of independence and responsibility. Within the chapters, students are given the opportunity to engage in self-analysis and reflection in order to understand their strengths, challenges, and aptitudes. Faculty and students will see the following consistent themes and approaches:
Student engagement and self-analysis are reflected in each section through applications and activities.
The diversity and intersectionality of students were considered in every example, context, and application, and the text's active surveys and detailed profiles make student voices a key element of the reading.
Interconnected topics are acknowledged and built upon, demonstrating that no element of college learning and growth occurs in isolation. The result is a cumulative, more complete understanding, which better prepares students to meet the multi-dimensional challenges of higher education.
Openly licensed and free in all digital formats, the text provides unparalleled flexibility in its use, customization, and accessibility for faculty and students. The book is provided at no cost in online, PDF, and other formats. It is also available in print for a very low price.
Robust instructor ancillaries will support faculty and course designers with teaching notes, additional exercises, worksheet versions of the in-text activities, lecture slides, and assessment items.
Features
- Student Profiles: The voices of real students inform every chapter. These students grapple with the same concepts, from improving study skills to embracing diversity, and through their experiences and successes we share important stories.
- Get Connected: Apps, websites and tech opportunities that our experts recommend to help students better face the challenges of college and life beyond the classroom.
- Analysis and Applications: Peppered through every chapter are opportunities for students to reflect on concepts, try out processes, and apply what they're learning.
- Student Surveys: Chapters begin with a survey, posing questions that will get readers engaged in considering their own level of connection and understanding of the chapter's concept, from time management to personal finance to career planning.
Estimated Module Completion Time
Each section of College Success Concise includes an estimate of the average time needed to read through the material and work on the activities and applications. Each student will engage the material differently, and faculty will likely prioritize or assign certain components over others. As a result, the actual time students spend will vary greatly. OpenStax will periodically update these estimates based on user feedback.
Answers to Questions in the Book
Answers to "Questions to Consider" questions are not provided to students due to the high variability of responses. The Instructor's Manual on the Instructor Resources page provides additional insight to assist in discussion about these questions. There is also a Test Bank of questions and answers only available to the instructor.
Additional Resources
Student and Instructor Resources
We've compiled additional resources for both students and instructors, including Getting Started Guides, lecture slides, and a Test Bank.
The most robust of these is the Instructor Resource Manual, developed by author Amy Baldwin based on extensive experience and requests from faculty reviewers and survey respondents. For each chapter, the IRM will contain:
- Detailed teaching suggestions
- Bloom's Taxonomy matrix, indicating the alignment of each chapter activity and application to the level of Bloom's it fulfills.
- Overarching “big picture” questions from the chapter
- Topical and cumulative case scenario activities, which present a realistic situation based on the concepts, and ask students to respond via writing or another method. These may be adapted and assigned by instructors.
Instructor resources require a verified instructor account, which you can apply for when you log in or create your account on OpenStax.org. Instructor and student resources are typically available within a few months after the book's initial publication. Take advantage of these resources to supplement your OpenStax book.
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To reach the Community Hubs, visit www.oercommons.org/hubs/OpenStax.
Technology Partners
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About the Authors
Senior Contributing Author
Amy Baldwin, University of Central Arkansas
Amy Baldwin has dedicated her entire career to supporting students in their successful transition to college. She wrote the first, groundbreaking student success textbook for community colleges and for first-generation students. After 18 years as an award-winning community college professor, she now serves as Director of the Department of Student Transitions at the University of Central Arkansas. This unique blend of experience provides perspective on two critical student and faculty populations, which she has brought to this book and her extensive work with Complete College America, Achieving the Dream, and the Developmental Education Initiative.
Amy and her husband Kyle live in Arkansas and have two children, Emily and Will.
Contributing Authors
Lisa August, Canisius College
James Bennett, Herzing University
Larry Buland, Metropolitan Community College
Jill Kaar, University of Colorado
Sabrina Mathues, Brookdale Community College
Susan Monroe, Northern Virginia Community College
MJ O'Leary, Wellness Multiplied
Ann Pearson, San Jacinto College
Joshua Troesh, El Camino College
Margit Misangyi Watts, University of Hawai'i at Manoa
Reviewers
Nagash Clarke, Washtenaw Community College
Laura Crisp, Pellissippi State Community College
Abbie Finnegan, Des Moines Area Community College
Kim Fragopoulos, University of Massachusetts-Boston
Maria Galyon, Jefferson Community & Technical College
Kimberly A. Griffith, Bristol Community College
Anna Howell, Portland Community College
Sarah Howard, The Ohio State University
Stacy L. Hurley, Baltimore County Community College
Dawn Lee, Charleston Southern University
Gail Malone, South Plains College
Kim Martin, Chemeketa Community College
Sherri Powell, Shawnee State University
Bobby E. Roberts, Jr., Savannah State University
Laila M. Shishineh, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Shavecca M. Snead, Albany State University
Jason Smethers, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Angela C. Thering, SUNY Buffalo State
Antione D. Tomlin, Anne Arundel Community College
Jessica Traylor, Gordon State College
Makeda K. Turner, University of Michigan
Dave Urso, Blue Ridge Community College
Margit Misangyi Watts, University of Hawaii at Manoa
Ann Wolf, New Mexico Highlands University