UNT is the largest provider of distance learning in Texas, and faculty wondered if they could apply some online teaching innovations to traditional classrooms. (Photo courtesy of University of North Texas/University Relations, Communications and Marketing)

The Promise of Blended Learning: Redesigning Large Lecture Courses at the University of North Texas

In the mid-2000s, the University of North Texas was pioneering distance learning methods, providing more online instruction than any other institution in the state. But the new pedagogies being created and refined for these online classes—taken mostly by graduate students and adult learners—were bypassing many of the students who might really benefit from them, remembers Philip Turner, a UNT professor of library and information science. “We saw some numbers that were really startling,” he says. “We had something like 600 sections of large intro-level lecture classes in which 25 percent of the students did not earn at least a C. This wasn’t acceptable to us.” So Turner got to thinking—what would undergraduate education look like if some of the innovative pedagogies being used in the new online classes were introduced to the traditional lecture classroom? The process of answering that question has evolved into UNT’s Next Generation Course Redesign project, which has grown since 2004 to involve people and departments from across the university. Turner, now a learning enhancement specialist at the university’s Center for Learning Enhancement, Assessment, and Redesign (CLEAR), has helped lead the way.

Rethinking the Lecture-Based Classroom

Turner and other faculty members began discussing how to improve teaching  and learning in large-enrollment lecture classes, specifically by incorporating some of the methods that worked well in distance learning—low-stakes quizzes, online message boards, and frequent interaction among students and with instructors. With a small amount of internal funding, the Blended Learning Project was launched in 2004. Ten faculty members volunteered to work together to redesign five introductory-level courses to incorporate electronic-based pedagogies that would complement the lecture portions of the classes. The following year, nine more courses were redesigned for Blended Learning II. In 2006, UNT included the goal of improving large courses in its Quality Enhancement Plan for reaccreditation, and received five years of funding to work on course redesign projects. The expanded project, called Next Generation Course Redesign (NGen), strives to create a community among faculty members who will work collaboratively to continually improve, test, assess, and reflect upon their courses.

“The movement from lecturing to teaching partially online sounds radical, but the radical part is really experiential learning,” Turner explains. “How do you get students engaged in experiential learning? That’s what our faculty members are asking.” In recruiting volunteers for some of the early course redesigns, Turner sought out colleagues who were especially dedicated to undergraduate teaching. “Instead of saying, let’s take every section of World Literature and change it, we looked for people who were really invested in teaching to get them involved.” In the case of World Literature I, one of those people was Tracey Gau, a UNT lecturer in English.  Gau was perturbed because she was seeing high drop-while-failing rates, low grades, and students showing up unprepared for her lecture-based World Lit class, which had anywhere from sixty-five to 150 students each semester and involved  two lectures each week. “When you have to do plot summaries in class, you risk losing the motivated and prepared students, who get really frustrated,” she says.

Students who participate in NGen redesigned courses overwhelmingly report that they prefer blended learning to traditional lecture classes. (Photo courtesy of University of North Texas/University Relations, Communications and Marketing)

So Gau redesigned the course to include six lectures, six smaller-group interactions of twenty to thirty-five students, and many independent online activities—with the online activities representing roughly 45 percent of students’ total class time. Typically, she’ll use a lecture session to preview three works of literature, then assign online modules related to the works. In the following weeks, students work online and meet in their smaller groups with Gau, where they do experiential and interactive activities, such as debating the authorship of Shakespearean literature. Then the process repeats throughout the semester.  “They’re still getting some lecture, which is important, because students need to see a seasoned expert model approaches to the material,” Gau explains. “But the online activities build their confidence, so that by the time they get to the small groups, they’re willing to do higher-level work and actually analyze and collaborate. The blended course provides more benchmarks, compared to the traditional course with two or three exams and nothing in between. ” Since the first Blended Learning project began, faculty members have redesigned more than twenty courses in similar ways.

Faculty Development for Online and Blended Learning

UNT’s NGen course redesigns have been successful in large part because of the community of practice faculty members have built. Because the course redesign process is structured and provides many opportunities for collaboration and support, faculty members who might not otherwise be interested in trying new pedagogies are more likely to make the leap. Redesigning a course is a two-year process that starts with the call for proposals each spring. Four to six faculty members whose proposals are accepted receive $12,000 in funding, released in sections over the course of the process. They can use the money for software, to pay graduate assistants, or to buy out teaching responsibilities to make time for research related to their course. In the first semester, these faculty fellows focus on developing learning outcomes for their course and creating the rubrics they will use to measure these outcomes, as well as developing the teaching materials for the class. When faculty members first pilot their redesigned courses, there’s often an “implementation dip,” Turner explains—assessments show that the redesigned course is less effective than the original. But that data helps faculty members refine their methods, and most courses show a strong improvement in learning outcomes after the second iteration of the redesigned course is taught. “The idea is that this is continuous and self-sustaining,” Turner says. “You continually assess and refine.” In their second year, faculty fellows become senior fellows and mentor new fellows with their redesigns, while perfecting their own.

Lee Hughes, a UNT assistant professor of biology, has been teaching a redesigned version of Principles of Biology I since fall 2006. In his redesigned course, students must read and prepare every day by completing online activities, rather than cramming at the end of the semester, he says. “Blended learning helps instill good study habits. You have to be engaged the whole time.” Redesigning his course has benefited his teaching as well, Hughes says, because it encouraged him to rethink how he taught material he knew very well.  “With NGen, we were able to take this new method and make it work for our content,” he explains. “No one came in and said, ‘You have to do it this way.’ And the community is really nice. You could do this by yourself, but it’s a lot more effective when you can bounce ideas off people doing the same things.” Hughes is now working on making his content transferable for use at other universities.

Because NGen courses tend to be taught by faculty members who are more dedicated to undergraduate teaching than to research, UNT has introduced a professional track to reward these instructors. Called Core Academy, the track includes redesigned courses that have met a rigorous professional standard and will be taught by the instructors who created them. Faculty members teaching in the Core Academy can get promoted, take sabbaticals, and participate in the faculty senate. Now in its second year, Core Academy provides an appealing nontenure alternative to attract new faculty interested in cutting-edge teaching strategies, Turner explains.

Assessing Mixed-Methods Courses

In assessing the NGen courses, UNT measures several things: academic success, attitude toward the course, attitude toward the NGen methods in particular, and the sustainability and replicability of the courses. Turner and his colleagues have compared “high success” (students earning a final grade of A or B) with “success” (final grade of A, B, or C) and found that NGen courses produce more students demonstrating high success compared with sections of the same course taught in traditional format.  “This isn’t experimental research and there is not a strict control group, but comparing with traditional course sections is still useful,” Turner says. UNT has also found that more than 70 percent of students in redesigned classes say they prefer the pedagogical methods in these classes to their traditional classes, because they like the challenge and being forced to think for themselves. About 30 percent of students prefer traditional courses, which is why Turner says the university doesn’t ever plan to phase them out completely. Redesigned courses also present significant logistical problems because of the many small-section meetings.  Scheduling difficulties are a continuing challenge.

UNT has found that NGen courses are sustainable and replicable by faculty members other than those who created the courses—nine courses have been replicated by other faculty, and the software for one course, U.S. History I, was made available to all public colleges in Texas through funding from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. Tracey Gau, the World Literature professor, is currently working as a consultant to UNT’s Center for Learning Enhancement, Assessment, and Redesign, redesigning the second half of the introductory world literature course and training other teachers to teach blended courses. She also wrote a textbook and is adapting her original course to be transferable to other instructors and universities. “Redesigning a course requires that you put away your old yellowed lecture notes and think of new ways to cover your material,” Gau says. “Once you’ve been transformed to thinking that way, you can’t go back.”

For more information about UNT’s Next Generation Course Redesign project, visit its Web site.