In Fall 2010, the state institutions of higher education in Missouri committed to a collective course redesign effort led by the nonprofit National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT). The goals of these course redesigns were to improve educational outcomes and lower costs, particularly in high-enrollment/high-DFW-rate courses. As part of this state-wide initiative, the College Algebra course at the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) was selected as one of the courses that would be redesigned during this process, and despite the fact that I was a new faculty member in mathematics that year, I was asked to lead this project. My role was to organize a team of UMKC faculty, staff, and administrators, and lead the team through an ambitious re-envisioning of our College Algebra course offering.
The objective of the project was to leverage emerging instructional technologies more effectively in order to improve student learning outcomes, increase student retention, and lower the costs of offering this high-enrollment/high-DFW-rate course. This not only required me, and my team, to overhaul the curriculum and course delivery method, but also required us to design a new state-of-the-art campus computing center.
As an additional component, my graduate student and I also engaged in a large-scale, longitudinal human subjects study exploring the impact of technologies such as online learning and assessment software and student response systems (clickers) on student attitudes, motivation, and success in mathematics. Due to my departure from UMKC in Summer 2012 to accept a position at Pacific University, I was unable to continue my work on this study, but it appears from the NCAT report on the project that the course redesign was largely successful in achieving its objectives.