Anyone who thinks computer-programming courses are as boring as binary code hasn't been to the University of Pittsburgh, where Daniel Mosse has enlisted Samurai warriors and ballerinas to help teach.These and other 3-D animations, culled from instructional software developed at Carnegie Mellon University, are helping the Pitt professor breathe life into an introductory course. It's just one example of a movement taking hold as higher education challenges old notions about teaching. On a variety of campuses, faculty worried about high failure rates or lessons that lack relevance are redesigning their courses to improve student success and even save money.At Pitt, rather than simply slaving over arcane computer code or worrying about misplaced commas in the code, the 44 students in Mosse's class will create short, animated films that show how computer code is used and why it must be precise.Carnegie Mellon's "Alice" software, with its catalogue of images and pre-programmed movements, is helping to make instruction more meaningful on an estimated 15 percent of the nation's campuses, where faculty such as Dr. Mosse worry about recent declines in computer science enrollment.By assessing what students actually get out of class and then using the data to make improvements, the redesigners are challenging a stubbornly held campus mind-set."Most institutions continue to believe that getting better results from students is totally impossible without better-prepared students, more money or both," said Kati Haycock, president of the Washington, D.C.-based Education Trust, a nonprofit advocacy group pushing for higher success rates in college.In fact, she said, schools teaching similar populations can have significantly different success rates. She said course redesign "is probably growing faster than any other innovation in higher education."Some redesigns involve "gatekeeper" courses, traditional, mostly freshmen lecture classes that are required within a student's major. These classes, some with enrollments running into the hundreds, can be notorious for high student failure and withdrawal rates.These classes may be less costly for institutions to deliver and historically were viewed as a tool to weed out those ill-suited to go further in a discipline. But such courses carry too high a price, given student attrition rates reaching 30 percent or more.A college can have 1,000 undergraduate courses, Haycock said, but 25 and 35 of them typically account for more than a third of all undergraduate enrollment," she said. "The idea is, if you can get those courses to work better -- high standards but more deliberative efforts to get students to meet those standards -- then you can really begin to turn around the undergraduate success rate."The National Center for Academic Transformation uses information technology in course redesigns that improve learning while reducing instructional costs. Over the last decade, it's been a catalyst for more than 200 large-scale redesigns on dozens of campuses in various courses such as algebra, chemistry, economic statistics and Spanish. The University of Alabama replaced standard lectures with required time in math labs, where students at computers tackle problems at their own pace and get help on the spot from instructors and tutors. In four years, the school raised from 40 percent to almost 75 percent the share of students in intermediate algebra earning a C- or better, said Joe Benson, interim vice president for research. The gains did not require hiring additional faculty. In fact, the cost per student declined by 28 percent.At the University of Notre Dame in 1997, Dennis Jacobs he took students whose low math entrance scores made them most at risk to fail and placed them in a redesigned version. It covered the same general chemistry topics but replaced standard lectures with interactive group learning that required students to develop and defend their ideas in talks with their peers.He found the success rate of those high-risk students increased from 40 percent to 70 percent. Fifty percent more of them succeeded in second-year chemistry than did their predecessors. The redesigned course has been expanded to other sections.At Carnegie Mellon, about 150 students in David Yaron's modern chemistry class work in a "virtual chemistry lab," part of an ongoing redesign that lets them experience the work that chemists do. Dr. Yaron said online lectures that students listen to before showing up enable him to skip a lot of talking and get right to working on their skills."Classes become more diagnostic," he said. "You're spending more time assessing how they did on the problems and working to strengthen areas where they need to be strengthened."(E-mail Bill Schackner at bschackner(at)post-gazette.com.)(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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