Colleagues Committed to Redesign (C2R)

Immediate Deadlines

•   Establish a Leadership Team

Establish a course redesign leadership team. Institutional teams should be made up of multiple players from each institution: faculty (key to creating high-quality content and sound pedagogy), IT staff (key to creating the technological infrastructure to support redesign), assessment experts (key to establishing reliable and valid measures of student learning), and academic administrators (key to making it possible for redesigns to be implemented and sustained.)

•   Create an Institute Team

Identify a subset of this group, a four-person Institute Team, who will attend a disciplinary institute. Institute Teams should consist of the chief academic officer (or designee), the chief technology officer (or designee) and two lead faculty members as indicated on the team form. Designate one of these team members as a lead contact person to be the liaison between the C2R Project Coordinator, Kay Katzer, and the Institute Team.

Deadline: February 13, 2009

•   Establish Three Baseline Assessments

Undertake a self-assessment process in which you analyze the learning and cost dimensions of the course you plan to redesign. Assemble baseline data on student learning outcomes, course completion rates and the cost of offering the course in its traditional format in order to document your “starting point” in the project prior to the course redesign. Even though you may plan to pilot your redesign with a sub-set of the whole course, please assemble baseline data for the whole course (all sections.)

Deadline: Send your baseline data to Pat Bartscherer by March 27, 2009.

Student learning outcomes

Read NCAT’s “Five Models for Assessing Student Learning” at http://www.thencat.org/PlanRes/R2R_ModAssess.htm. Using this document as a guide, please complete the “C2R Baseline Assessment Data” form.

If you have baseline data, please include it on the form. If you do not have the data, please describe how you will collect it during your pilot.

Course completion rates

Complete the “C2R Baseline Course Completion Data” form. The data that we are requesting should be self-explanatory.

Traditional course costs

NCAT’s Course Planning Tool (CPT) has proven to be an important part of the course redesign process because it facilitates a team analysis of all of the instructional tasks in both the traditional and redesigned format of the course as well as its associated costs. Complete sheets 1 and 2 of the CPT (the summary of personnel costs and the analysis of the course in its traditional format) for the course you intend to redesign. This exercise will help you understand the various components of the course, consider those that can be changed and those that cannot, and analyze the sources of course costs.

A downloadable version of the CPT, instructions for how to complete it and completed examples can be found at http://www.thencat.org/PlanRes/CPTdesc.htm. If you have difficulty downloading the CPT, please contact Pat Bartscherer at patb@theNCAT.org.

If you have questions about any of these assessments, please contact Kay Katzer at kkatzer@theNCAT.org.

•   Help NCAT Plan the Disciplinary Institutes

Kay Katzer, C2R Project Coordinator, will be in touch with the lead contact person from your team to discuss your course redesign ideas and to get an idea of the kinds of resources you need and issues you face. She will convey these conversations to NCAT staff and the Redesign Scholars, who will design the disciplinary institutes in response to the specific needs and questions articulated by the participating campus teams and the particularities of the discipline. Kay will begin contacting you as soon as you have sent us your contact information.