Orientation Course Juergen Schneider

Pick a topic for your course
The course will be for international students and students with origins outside of California, who live and/or study at a Californian university for the first time. Goals can be:
1. students get to know their city in respect to their preferences
2. students in the same university get connected
3. students get to know other cities in California in respect to their preferences through distance education (presented by students who live there)

Determine your audience for this course
International students and students with origin outside of California.

Write a brief description of your mini-analysis
The survey was realised as a paper-and-pencil questionnaire. This was due to the easier accessibility of the target students who live on my floor of the University Towers. The questionnaire consisted of 13 questions. As an example I picked San Diego and San Francisco. It was to determine, where they come from, what they already know about San Diego and San Francisco and what they want to know about those two cities. An additional item was added to evaluate if they are actually interested in building up new relationships or making new friends.
The students were asked to answer the questions concerning their knowledge before they arrived in San Diego this semester.

What types of questions did you include in your survey?
1. Single choice questions concerning their origin.
2. Single choice and open questions concerning their knowledge about San Diego and San Francisco.
3. Open question about what they would like to know about San Diego and San Francisco.
4. Likert scale of their opinion towards building up new relationships

How many people took your survey?
11 students took the survey. 9 International students and 2 students from USA outside California.
What did you find out from your mini-analysis?
Especially the international student who have never been to San Diego or San Francisco before (n=7) score poor on knowledge about the city, which is no surprise. In return they want to know a lot about it, which starts from rather touristy ideas like “the best beach” up to rather particular ideas like “a place to get my Fiat repaired”
Most mentioned for San Diego was
- best beach (n=7)
- good bars/clubs, good city maps (n=6)
- nice places to hang out/ relax/recreation (n= 4)
- car rental (3)
Most mentioned for San Francisco was
- must-see-sights (n=8)
- best beach (n=7)
- how to get there by car/train, good city maps (n=4)
- bars/clubs, no-go-areas/ areas to avoid (n=3)
All except of one participant “agreed” or “ageed strongly” to the question if they want to built new relationships or make new friends (on a five staged Likert scale). One participant “neither agreed nor disagreed”.

How can you use this information to help design your course?
Last finding leads me to the conclusion that the discovery of the city where the students actually live should be undertaken in groups. Several students from one university will gather, form a group and discover the city together. which will enhance building up connections and relationships.
The other findings concern the content of the course. What are the students looking for? Where can the instructor help them out and how do the students from San Francisco prepare for the presentation?