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The University of New Mexico Course Title: General Psychology Status: This project originated as part of NCAT’s Pew-funded Program in Course Redesign (PCR) program, 1999 – 2003, and was successfully completed. Descriptive Materials: In addition to the project description below, links for this project include a full academic plan, a full cost savings plan, a completed Course Planning Tool (CPT) an interim progress report, and a final project report. The final project report describes the impact of the redesign on student learning and student retention; final cost savings achieved; techniques that most contributed to improved learning and reduced costs; and, as assessment of future sustainability. Project Plan: The new course will reduce the number of lectures each week to one and will incorporate a weekly 50-minute studio session led by undergraduate teaching assistants (UGTAs) in computer labs. UGTAs will be drawn from students who have shown a 90% or better mastery of the material in previous sections of General Psychology or who are upper-division honors students. These activities will be supplemented by interactive hybrid Internet/CD-ROM activities, quizzes, and programmed self-instruction offered on a 24/7 schedule. Students will take repeatable quizzes each week requiring a C-level of mastery, course management software will enable the team to track student learning proficiency. An active intervention strategy will ensure that students are making progress. Graduate teaching assistants will monitor quiz performance and will contact and counsel students who fail to achieve a C level of performance as to how to improve. The course redesign will enhance the learning experience for students in several key ways. First, course content will be consistent across sections. Second, while the traditional course format has focused on improving teaching, the redesign will focus on what the student is learning by assessing learning outcomes and providing frequent feedback to the students and instructors. Third, the redesign will foster greater peer interaction and work within teams as well as increased student contact with upper level peer leaders to facilitate learning. Fourth, an active intervention strategy will ensure that students are making progress in the course rather than waiting until final exam time to discover that they are not. The impact of the redesign on learning will be based on a standard general psychology assessment examination administered pre- and post- in both traditional and re-designed sections. Survey data looks at changes in attitude on a post-hoc basis and a pre-survey looks at a number of expectations items plus readiness to use technology. All of these standard data are individually-identifiable, enabling a range of analyses of differential impact to be undertaken using an established cohort tracking database; this capacity is especially salient given UNM's distinctive student population. The redesign will produce substantial cost savings by: 1) reducing the number of faculty and instructors teaching the course; 2) reducing the course failure and retake rates; and, 3) increasing student retention and graduation rates which affects state funding. The cost per student will be reduced from $72 to $38, a 47% decrease. Reductions in instructor time devoted to lecture presentation and delivery represent the source of greatest savings from the redesign. Faculty time is reduced from 1,056 hours to 220 hours per year and professional/staff time from 90 hours to 8 hours per year. Overall, annual course delivery costs decrease from $161,184 to $85,012, a cost savings of $76,172 to the department.
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Program in Course Redesign Quick Links: Program In Course Redesign Main Page... Lessons Learned: Savings: |
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