Dive Brief:

• A course first developed for University of Washington freshmen is being made available via Coursera in a more generalized format for new students and their parents.
• The Seattle Times reports that “U101: Understanding College and College Life” describes how colleges and universities operate, what college-level work looks like, what effective study strategies are, and how to choose a major, among other topics.
• The Coursera course takes between four and five hours to finish and gives students an early intro to college lessons that many don’t take away until they are upperclassmen, missing out on some of the opportunities to make the most out of their degrees.

Dive Insight:

The University of Washington has already made McGarrity’s first course required. Other colleges might consider making the more general version a standard piece of orientation by pointing students to Coursera, which will host the course for free. Those with substantial internal capacity could even create their own primer on college life, specific to their institution, if they haven't already.

The sooner students learn the basics of college, the more they can get out of the college experience and the better their outcomes can be. That could mean higher graduation and job placement rates, two measures the Obama administration has focused on in its College Scorecard, pushing prospective students to consider them in their selection process.