Missouri Course Redesign Initiative
Truman State University
Course Title: Lifetime Health and Fitness
Contact: Chris Lantz
Lifetime Health and Fitness is a course offered in Truman State University’s core liberal studies program. It is currently taught by seven different instructors in approximately 15 separate sections annually. Each of the sections enrolls about 80 students; the course serves about 1,300 students annually.
Truman plans to redesign this course for three primary reasons. The first concerns course drift. With multiple sections running concurrently, the faculty members recognize their tendency to emphasize personal points of interest in health-related behaviors and outcomes resulting in inconsistent experiences for students across sections. Course redesign will address this issue by creating one large section per semester with highly specific outcome objectives and a significantly smaller number of faculty members overseeing its offering. The second concern is with the resources required to offer multiple sections. With continuing budget restrictions, it becomes increasingly important to deploy personnel resources in a more efficient manner. The redesign will take advantage of available and emerging technology coupled with the use of student support to provide a more cost efficient means of instructing the course. The third area of concern relates to student attitudes toward the course. The course has maintained a somewhat negative reputation among students over time. Relatively minor changes to outcomes and format have done little to improve student attitudes. The hope for the redesign is that the extensive use of technology will reflect the changing ways in which students are learning and interacting with the world around them, and thus by extension, their feelings toward the course will improve.
Truman has selected the Online Model of redesign and will significantly reduce in-class instructor time. The redesign will shift the learning dynamic from instructor driven (passive) to student driven (active) by featuring on-ground and online, self-guided and instructor-guided learning experiences that complement foundational personal health course content. These experiences will take the form of stress management activities (e.g., yoga, progressive relaxation, guided meditation), behavior change activities (e.g., identify and implement a program designed to change a targeted health behavior), diet analysis, body composition analysis, cardiovascular endurance test (e.g., timed one-mile walk or 1.5-mile run) among others. Students will be required to access the self-guided supplemental experiences through the university’s Blackboard course management system or McGraw Hill Connect On-line Resource, which supports the course text, Fit and Well: Core Concepts and Labs in Physical Fitness and Wellness. Instructor-guided experiences will be completed in structured laboratory or field settings at scheduled times. By increasing active learning experiences, integrating online resources and assessments, and utilizing undergraduate learning assistants (ULAs) to serve as “peer health mentors,” the course will become more responsive to fast-changing personal health knowledge. In addition, the course outcomes will become standardized for all students, and student enthusiasm for the course will increase.
The redesigned course will be evaluated by Truman’s Center for Applied Statistics and Evaluation (CASE) by conducting learning outcome and attitudinal evaluation. CASE will provide an item-by-item analysis of the common final and will conduct focus groups and attitude surveys of both redesigned and traditional sections of the course.
The redesigned course will reduce course sections from 15 (annually) to two and reduce faculty involvement in course instruction from seven to two people team-teaching the one large section offered each term. By reducing the number of sections, integrating on-line resources and assessments, and utilizing ULAs, the course will become more cost efficient. The cost-per-student will decrease from $32 in the traditional course to $21 in the redesigned format, a reduction of 34%. Cost savings will enable faculty members to teach additional sections of other courses much needed to support the increasing number of majors, support Truman’s liberal studies program and spend greater time developing community/student partnerships.
Quick Links:
