Ohio Honors will be administered by the Honors Tutorial College and will start next Spring Semester.
Ohio University’s Class of 2021 can apply to the new honors program, OHIO Honors, and undergraduate students can participate starting next Spring Semester.
OHIO Honors will be administered by the Honors Tutorial College, which also administers the Office of Nationally Competitive Awards and the Cutler Scholars Program, acting Dean of HTC Cary Frith said.
The new program was officially approved through the University Curriculum Council in November, Frith said.
“The impetus for the program is that when we look at the enrollment in HTC and then the participation in other honors and scholar opportunities on campus … there are fewer than two percent of the undergraduates at OU that are served by these programs,” Frith said.
When compared to public institutions similar to OU’s size, the average is seven percent, Frith said.
“The saddest part of my job … is meeting really engaged students who were looking for an honors experience and saying ‘No thank you’ to them,” Frith said. “I never want another student to go to Miami or Ohio State because we can’t offer them an honors education.”
OHIO Honors is going to be using an Honors Experience Model, Frith said.
Students in OHIO Honors will have to complete a set number of curricular and co-curricular honors experiences each year they are in the program and then they will graduate with Honors Transcript Designation, Frith said.
“That is in contrast to HTC where our students join us, we are their home college, we have separate degree programs that actually have to be approved through the Ohio Board of Regents,” Frith said. “The new OHIO Honors Program will be a supplement to the student’s home major and is going to allow the student to choose an individual area of emphasis.”
OHIO Honors will have three engagement pathways — leadership, service learning and community engagement, and research and creative activity — Frith said, noting those are inaugural and more will be probably be added.
“Within each pathway, the students will do a set number of curricular and a set number of co-curricular activities each year,” Frith said.
The way OHIO Honors is set up, students may apply to the program up until the beginning of their junior year, Frith said, which will allow for undecided and transfer students to participate.
“On the curricular side of things, we are going to use what’s called the honors contract model,” Frith said. “A student may approach any faculty member at the beginning of the semester to set up an honors contract with that faculty member.”
A student can choose an area of a course they are interested in and negotiate with a faculty member about doing extra work, but the contract must be approved by the honors advisors, Frith said.
“Faculty are under no obligation to accept a contract,” Frith said. “They don't have to say yes to a student, but we want to incentivise them to do so.”
Starting in the fall, HTC is going to be offering paid workshops for faculty to train them about what these contract experiences can be in, Frith said.
Also in the fall, Frith said, they plan on recruiting 50 to 75 current students into the inaugural cohort who would start in the spring.
Frith said the hope is to have about 200 incoming students for the 2017-18 academic year and leave about 50 slots for existing students on campus to opt in.
“In the first year, we are hoping to have honors sections of the disciplinary learning communities, and then, we will have an honors seminar in the Spring Semester.
Students in OHIO honors will complete a year long capstone project their senior year, Frith said.
“I think having more opportunities for people to get a better education is always a good thing,” Annalycia Liston-Beck, a sophomore studying political science in HTC, said.
Abigail Randall, a freshman studying education, said she also thinks OHIO Honors is a good idea.
“I think people, when they are trying to decide if they want to go to OU and they see that we have an honors program, they're going to want to try to get into that,” Randall said.
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