Educational Technology Report: Conference examines best practices for and benefits of course redesign

Posted on March 29, 2007 
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Please note: This is the first installment in a regular feature on the Education Technology Services blog, the Educational Technology Report. Please check back for later installments. We expect to issue around three of these a week. If you have any ideas for stories and/or want to tell the world about something you are doing in educational technology, you can email me, Jamie Oberdick, at jco11@psu.edu. You can also contribute by offering comments on these articles - let’s start a conversation. Thanks in advance for your contributions.

John Harwood, senior director of Penn State’s Teaching and Learning with Technology (TLT), recently attended The Redesign Alliance, the first annual conference of The National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT).

The NCAT is an independent not-for-profit organization that promotes the use of technology to redesign learning environments to produce better student outcomes at a reduced cost to the institution. The conference brings together a community of higher-education institutions and others who are committed to and have experience with course redesign.

One of the things that Harwood noted while at the conference was how the different types of institutions represented at the event all seemed to teach the same introductory courses. This is true whether the institution is a community college, a state system, or a large individual institution like Penn State or Ohio State University. What is even more remarkable is he learned that many introductory courses have as high as an 80 percent “poor performance rate”, which means students get an F, a D, or withdraw from the course. “This has a dramatic impact on student retention,” he said. “A student may think he or she might not graduate in four years, but instead will take five years just to get their first degree.”

At the conference, Harwood learned more about how course redesign helped to solve poor student performance rate and other problems in education, including case studies and tips on how to improve courses. One of the many highlights was the Keynote given by Carol A. Twigg, president and CEO or NCAT, titled “State of the Art Course Redesign: What We’ve Achieved and Where We Need to Go”. There were also a variety of panel discussions and sessions. The entire agenda can be viewed here: http://thencat.org/RedesignAlliance/Agenda.htm

Harwood said that for effective course redesign, a process should be followed. The very first step is to define learning objectives. Unfortunately, many courses do not have defined learning objectives, just ill-defined goals. There also needs to be set method of measuring learning objectives, and also faculty should tie in their instruction with meeting the learning objectives. Harwood said conference speakers recommended helping faculty improve their courses by doing such things as providing course templates, inspire them to do better via examples, and share with them course materials that have proved to work in the past.

However, this is not exactly a new idea to Penn State. For example, the Statistics Department, the Schreyer Institute, and TLT’s Elizabeth Pyatt worked together on a Pew Learning and Technology Program at the Center for Academic Transformation to redesign the Statistics 200 Elementary Statistics course. In fact, this effort received the Sloan-C Award for Excellence in Online Cost Effectiveness in 2002 (http://css.its.psu.edu/news/nlsp03/stat200.html).

Along with course redesign, assessment was a subject of much discussion at the event, Harwood said. While Penn State is accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, he had learned that there was talk at the conference about Congress becoming involved with mandates about assessment. He said that currently, assessment is more about grade results and not about actual learning, so there may be a need for new tactics in measuring learning.

Overall, Harwood said that he came away feeling rather good about how well Penn State does with course redesign. The award-winning efforts with Statistics 200, along with successful course redesigns of Spanish I, Spanish II, Spanish III, and Biology 110, are testament to this. “Along with our previous course redesigns, what was discussed at the conference blends nicely with our Blended Learning Initiative efforts,” he said. “There was certainly no culture shock for me at the conference.”

Harwood said for the next Redesign Alliance Conference, he would like to bring faculty representatives with him from different departments to help them get involved. “TLT is dressed for the dance, we just need it to start,” he said. “TLT can’t dance by itself, we need faculty to dance with us in this and the other initiatives that we do.”

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