Large lecture courses are a traditional mainstay of any university campus. They have historically provided an extremely efficient way to impart information to the largest number of students with the least amount of faculty resources. However, abundant research indicates that students are better prepared and more engaged when they learn in environments that are interactive and/or provide a more personalized experience.
The project aimed to leverage technology to transform large lecture courses in order to provide increased student-centered learning. This project provided the necessary support structure to faculty who wished to explore new pedagogies and instructional technologies, and change the way the traditional large lecture courses have been taught. Support were provided by staff from the Office of Teaching, Learning & Technology and local instructional support staff.
The technologies and pedagogies employed are based upon models that have already proven successful around the country, however, innovations and improvements to those practices were implemented by the project team in collaboration with the faculty partner.
A research study was conducted to examine the effectiveness of the program. The study adopted a mixed-method which is a procedure for collecting and analyzing both quantitative and qualitative data in order to develop informed conclusions about the innovation in instruction. The major research question centered on the impact of the innovation on student engagement and learning outcomes. First, to draw comparisons between the transformed and a traditional large lecture course, the researcher included in the assessment study a similar large lecture course that were traditionally taught traditionally.
The researcher administered three to four surveys to each course during the semester to compare students’ attitudes toward the instructional strategies in their particular courses. A focus group interview was conducted to assess students’ perceptions of helpfulness of their courses in-depth.
