Program in Course Redesign – Round III Results

http://www.center.rpi.edu/PewGrant/Rd3Less.html

You may well see this a few times today – the Program in Course Redesign, a massive project across 30 partnering institutions to demonstrate how colleges and universities can redesign their instructional approaches using technology to achieve cost savings as well as quality enhancements, has released the results of the Round III redesigns.

This round looked at course redesigns in 10 institutions, and similarly to previous rounds found some of the biggest quality improvements through 4 techniques – continuous assessment and feedback, increased interaction among students, online tutorials, and undergraduate learning assistants (ULAs.) In terms of costs reductions, I was pleased to see that both course management systems and ‘shared resources’ were cited as two of the predominant cost-reduction techniques in this round.

I haven’t been able to find any numbers on how they measured changes in quality enhancements (one assumes grades and retention rates at least) but if they are anything like the costs savings they report, an average of 39%, then clearly the findings from this study warrant attention. – SWL