How can information technology help address higher education’s challenges of access, quality, and cost? Carol Twigg, president and chief executive officer of the National Center for Academic Transformation, maintained that these issues are interrelated, explaining that “rising costs affect access; if students don’t succeed once they are at college, it’s a quality issue. We need to work on these issues simultaneously.” Taking advantage of information technology’s capabilities to design new learning environments can improve student learning outcomes while reducing costs, she said.

Assumptions about IT, however, often get in the way of achieving those goals, Twigg said. “Rather than seeing IT as an investment that can improve educational quality, people often view technology as yet another cost driver—a budgetary black hole that may even threaten quality (to them, the gold standard of instruction remains face to face and IT can only diminish that).”

The most popular form of using technology is the online small seminar, in which instructors simply take what they are doing in class and put it online. “This does a big job in improving access but hasn’t been shown to improve student learning,” Twigg noted. “To improve learning, you have to think about how to use the technology.”

Redesigning courses to use technology to improve learning and reduce costs has been shown to be effective, Twigg said, but approaches to redesign must be inventive and creative. “Redesign takes on the whole course, not just a single class, which improves quality and provides consistency. The redesigned course emphasizes active learning—greater student engagement with the material, content, and with one another—and relies heavily on readily available interactive software used independently and in teams,” Twigg explained. In addition, redesigned courses increase on-demand, individualized assistance; provide extended hours for labs and online tutorial assistance; automate only those course components that can benefit from automation, such as homework, quizzes, and exams; and replace a single mode of instruction with differentiated personnel strategies. The bottom line, according to Twigg: “We know what good pedagogy is, but technology enables us to leverage good pedagogy with larger numbers of students.”

She described redesign models that have proven successful:

1. Supplemental Model—add to the current structure and/or change the content;

2. Replacement Model—blend face-to-face with online activities;

3. Emporium Model—discard individual sections and create one section coordinated by one instructor and supported by undergraduate helpers with a 24/7 open lab;

4. Fully Online Model—conduct all or most learning activities online with an emphasis on student-to-student interaction, teaming, automated grading, and feedback;

5. Buffet Model—mix and match according to student preferences—assess each student’s knowledge/skill level; provide an array of high-quality, interactive learning materials and activities; develop individual study plans; build in continuous assessment to provide practice and feedback; offer varied human interaction when appropriate.

Twigg said faculty members often start such course redesign work unconvinced, but once they’ve been through it, their comments are positive: “It’s the best experience I’ve ever had in a classroom, creating more interesting interaction with students.” “The quality of my work life has changed immeasurably.” “It’s a lot of work during the transition, but it’s worth it.”

For more information on Twigg’s work, see the National Center for Academic Transformation’s website, www.theNCAT.org.