Pamala V. Morris was tired of the silence. Talking candidly about race, gender, and religion is no easy task in any environment, but with 150 students staring back at her every week, reluctant to say a word, the Purdue University professor had to do better.
Her course, “Communicating Across Cultures,” was supposed to get her students to think more deeply about challenges they might encounter after they graduated from Purdue’s College of Agriculture. She was determinedly enthusiastic in her twice-weekly lectures. Yet whenever she asked a question about a sensitive topic, “they were quiet,” she says. “I mean, you could hear a pin drop.”
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She had heard about Impact, a program designed to help Purdue faculty members build more-active and engaged classrooms. It promised regular meetings at which groups of instructors would hear from technology and curricular-design experts, study the research on effective learning, share stories, and test out new ways of teaching. She signed up in the fall of 2013. “I was desperate,” says Morris, director of the college’s Office of Multicultural Programs and a professor in the department of agricultural sciences education and communication.
The experience was transformative, she says. Morris ditched the long lectures, moved into an active-learning classroom, put students around circular tables, designed group exercises, and stepped aside. Now, instead of dead air, she hears them talking about complicated issues like sexual harassment.
What makes Morris’s experience noteworthy is the scale at which such transformations are happening at Purdue. Begun in 2011, Instruction Matters: Purdue Academic Course Transformation, or Impact, has trained more than 300 faculty members from across the campus in engaged-learning strategies. The university estimates that 528 courses, including several with large enrollments like Morris’s, have been redesigned.
According to a recent outside evaluation, Impact-affected courses generally have higher end-of-course final grades and fewer students who withdraw or earn Ds and Fs. Students and faculty members report greater satisfaction and more active engagement in such courses. Faculty members also say that students are more likely to use effective study habits and demonstrate critical thinking compared with students in other courses.
In the review, George D. Kuh, a professor emeritus of higher education at the Center for Postsecondary Research at Indiana University, calls Impact a “textbook illustration of how to successfully deliver timely, substantive, high-quality professional-development experiences over an extended period of time to a particularly discerning audience.”
Many colleges promote effective pedagogy, of course, but struggle to support faculty members in their pursuit of course redesign. So what has made Purdue’s program so effective? Kuh and others point to several elements, including support from leadership, an innovative curriculum, and incentives such as stipends to compensate faculty members for their time.
Gary R. Bertoline, dean of Purdue Polytechnic Institute, one of the university’s 10 academic colleges, says that when Purdue’s president, Mitch Daniels, came to speak to faculty members in Bertoline’s college about the importance of Impact training, interest shot up. The training has been a cornerstone of a broader transformation of the institute to focus more on active learning, interdisciplinary coursework, innovation, and critical thinking. About 75 percent of the institute’s 150 or so faculty members have gone through the training.
Impact uses a team approach and spreads training out over 13 weeks — another reason for its popularity. Grouping people into interdisciplinary cohorts, says Chantal Levesque-Bristol, executive director of the Center for Instructional Excellence, which runs the program, helps professors break out of their silos and see common classroom challenges. Morris, for example, adopted new technologies she learned about from professors and tech experts in her group, including a Purdue app called Hotseat that lets students respond anonymously on their phones to questions in class, and a virtual-reality experience through the campus’s Envision Center that enables students to feel what it’s like to be in a wheelchair.
Advocates say the stipends provided to those who go through Impact training are necessary to generate widespread interest. “It’s unreasonable to expect faculty to do significant changes in their classroom if you as a university or a department or a college are not willing to invest in them,” says Bertoline.
Yet programs like Impact won’t lead to large-scale reforms if faculty members don’t receive other types of crucial support along the way, advocates say. A survey of faculty members who went through the program pointed to two challenges to sustaining change: a lack of departmental support, and the heavy time commitment needed to keep the course transformation going.
Only 40 percent of respondents felt their course transformation was sustainable “without exerting a significant amount of additional effort” beyond what the initial changes required. “Active learning takes more time and thought and mental energy in terms of how you’re conveying information and interacting with students,” says David Nelson, associate director of the Center for Instructional Excellence. “And that can be incredibly taxing if you’re working 60 hours a week, sitting on committees, and doing grant applications.”
The hope, Impact’s supporters say, is that increased access to the program, accompanied by changes in tenure-and-promotion policies that reward innovative teaching, could lead to a culture shift on campus. That, says, Levesque-Bristol, is the reality behind change: “You have to work at it constantly.”
Beth McMurtrie writes about technology’s influence on teaching and the future of learning. Follow her on Twitter @bethmcmurtrie, or email her at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com.
