May-June 2007

The following is an interview with Carol A. Twigg, winner of the 2007 Virginia B. Smith Innovative Leadership Award, sponsored by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education and the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning. Twigg currently is president of the National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT) and from 1993 to 1998 was vice president of Educom. The award recognizes her leadership in redesigning gateway courses using technology to increase student learning while lowering costs. 

 Twigg was interviewed by Virginia B. Smith, president emerita of Vassar College, founding director of the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE), and former associate director of the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education. Joni Finney is vice president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.


Smith:  First, Carol, let me tell you how impressed the award-selection committee was by the National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT) and, in particular, your work with the 30 colleges and universities involved in the Program in Course Redesign. But before we get into that, I’m curious to know how you first became interested in information technology (IT).

Twigg:  Actually I can pinpoint the date. In 1980, I went to a conference in Minnesota, where I saw my first personal computer. I immediately thought, ‘This is going to be important in education.’

Smith:  Do you know why it made such an immediate impression on you?

Twigg:  I was then working at SUNY’s Empire State College, usually referred to as a “college without walls” because it has no campus or classrooms. In this kind of college, there is a real issue of how students can communicate with one another and with faculty members. How do you recreate the campus experience when everyone is not in the same place? Personal computing appeared to be a technology that would be accessible to people in their own homes, and that seemed to me to have tremendous potential for helping them communicate easily with each other.

Smith:  And did you, in fact, then bring computing to Empire State?

Twigg:  Yes. I was assistant vice president for academic affairs, but informally, I also became the first academic computing officer (in those days, most colleges didn’t have separate staffs for their academic computing needs). In the early 1980s, we started running faculty-development programs at Empire State in order to get the faculty interested in using computing and networks. For that decade, faculty development was a major focus of my work.

Smith: Was this difficult to do? I remember that in those days, some computer-science departments thought that their only function was to teach computer languages for students who wanted to do programming. To teach faculty or students to use computers was considered beneath them. 

Twigg:  That was a big problem. In the beginning, we had an administrative computing staff that thought that computers were for record-keeping, not teaching. But eventually that staff reported to me. Then we started to integrate academic and administrative computing. We did all that pretty early on, compared to most institutions.
Smith:  I think when I heard some of your earlier talks, you had already left Empire State and were with Educom. It seemed to me that then, your primary focus was on the technology and the need to use it for teaching and learning. Later, and especially recently, you’ve been emphasizing not IT itself, but its use in improving learning and reducing cost. 

Twigg:  Using IT to improve learning and reduce cost has always been my purpose—basically, I’ve been giving the same speech for 15 years. In 1991, I wrote an article about improving academic productivity that contained basically the same ideas that underlie all the programs we’re running now. The same themes—improving the quality of learning, reducing cost, and increasing access—were also the basis of my work at Educom.

But in those early days, most people in higher education were not really conversant with technology, so they tended to hear only the parts about computers. Now, because people are used to technology—everybody uses e-mail and the Web, for example—they can pay more attention when I talk about the purposes of using it in education.

Finney:  Carol, just to follow up on Virginia’s question, are you familiar with the book, The Tipping Point?

Twigg:  Yes.

Finney:  When do you think we reached two tipping points—the first when faculty became much more comfortable using computing generally and the second when faculty began to use IT as a tool for redesigning courses and improving learning? 

Twigg:  I would say we reached the first tipping point by the late 1990s. Before that, when I visited campuses as a part of my work with Educom, I felt like I was viewed as coming from a different world, one that most faculty didn’t understand. I had many discussions with faculty who believed you couldn’t use technology in teaching. All of that initial resistance had pretty much died down by the turn of the century. 

But the second tipping point is still to come. What seems to underlie many discussions today is the assumption that what technology is good for is developing online courses, which is not our emphasis at NCAT. Instead, we focus on technology as a tool we can use in course redesign to increase learning and reduce cost. Although we haven’t really reached that point yet, I’m very encouraged. All of a sudden, the interest in our work is practically exploding. I think a lot will happen in the next two or three years.

Smith:  Do you suggest to the colleges and universities you are working with how to use technology in their courses?

Twigg:  No. In the redesign process, we ask faculty members to make decisions about where to use technology and where not to. That’s an important part of the process. We have created what we call the course-planning tool, which requires them to analyze what’s involved in both preparing and offering a course, and we support them in that analysis. This helps them think about where it makes sense to use the technology and where it doesn’t.

Smith:  And was the desire for cost-effectiveness always a part of your plan?

Twigg:  Yes—it’s always been a major focus of my work. In the 1990s, I thought it was the most important public-policy issue facing higher education, and I think that now, if anything, that’s even more the case. Focusing on costs was very controversial at the beginning, and it still is to some degree. Most faculty members feel it’s not their business to worry about the cost of courses.

Smith:  In the course-redesign project you completed in 2003, I understand that an independent evaluation confirmed that you were indeed able to make significant savings while achieving gains in learning.

Twigg:  Yes, definitely. All 30 courses redesigned in the Program in Course Redesign, each at a different college or university, reduced costs from 15 to 77 percent, with an average reduction of 37 percent. At the same time, 25 of the 30 projects showed significant increases in student learning, while the other five showed learning equivalent to traditional formats.

Smith:  Is it true that most of these courses were large introductory courses with several  sections?

Twigg:  Yes, all of them were.

Smith:  Did you choose such courses for a reason?

Twigg:  Definitely. Actually there were several reasons, but perhaps the most important was that since those courses are so large, addressing them enables us to make large savings. And we’ve found other important benefits in working with these courses. Because they’re at the introductory level, they have a strong impact on student success. Also, redesigning introductory courses has proven to be the easiest entry point, since faculty members generally feel less possessive about them. You’re not trying to change “their own” courses—in a sense, the entry course is everybody’s.

Smith:  Since the entry-level course is taught by several faculty, do you find at most institutions that they have already talked quite a bit to each other about it and come to some agreement on what students are expected to learn?

Twigg:  Unfortunately, no. Generally speaking, the intro course is primarily taught by a disparate group of adjuncts, non-tenure-track faculty, and some tenure-track instructors. Typically, there’s no common final exam. In many cases, multiple textbooks are used. Entry-level courses are really not organized the way you might expect multi-section introductory courses to be handled.

Smith:  Amazing, since it’s supposed to be a foundation course for every other course in the department.

Twigg:  Exactly. But it’s because the academic culture that lets every instructor do his or her own thing is stronger than the desire for common outcomes. I’ve often said that we standardize the student experience but individualize faculty experience. The faculty member does what he or she wishes for the whole class, but all the students in that class are usually given the same experience. If greater individualization of the student experience is needed to increase learning, faculty may have to change the way their courses are offered. 

Smith:  Do you find that faculty typically understand what impact greater individualization could have on the learning process?

Twigg:  Unfortunately, no. Faculty members do want to do a better job in helping students learn, but they need to be given some good alternatives in order to be motivated to change. And they need to be inspired by solid demonstrations that the alternatives work.

Smith:  I notice that the list of readiness criteria that NCAT uses includes a very important one of asking faculty what learning they want to achieve. Do they usually have difficulty doing this?

Twigg:  If you have a situation where every individual faculty member teaching the course is doing his or her own thing, it’s more difficult to come to the kind of consensus you need in order to redesign the whole course, which is what we do in our programs. To do that, the faculty members teaching the course have to agree on common learning outcomes, or at least a substantial core of them, with some variation around the edges. 

That process is frequently difficult for faculty. Having said that, they universally say, after having gone through the process, that it was tremendously beneficial for all sorts of reasons. When they actually sit down and talk over what they all believe students really need to know and be able to do, it leads to greater collegiality and becomes a very important faculty-development activity. 

Smith:  And of course, assessment is integral to your course-redesign projects. It has to serve as the basis for determining learning gains.

Twigg:  Right. You know, I used to believe in assessment. But now I really believe in it. I better understand its value and its benefits. I no longer view assessment as just an exercise that people go through; I now see it as integral to creating change in higher education. 

So we’re trying to instill a habit of thinking and practice in institutions, but we’re going from the one-course level and ratcheting it up, rather than starting with the institution as a whole and trying to ratchet it down.

Smith:  Do you feel that when faculty go through the process of clarifying their learning goals, they’re primarily concerned with content rather than concepts or abilities?

Twigg:  That’s a very good question. I think that they start out worrying about content coverage, but when they start focusing on how well students are learning and absorbing the material, their interest starts to shift to whether students are retaining a conceptual base and have developed the skills to study further. As that shift happens, they begin to worry less about coverage. I think this a very important part of the process.

Smith:  And you find that actually happening?

Twigg:  Oh, absolutely—we see this all the time. In some of the projects in our recent Road-Map to Redesign (R2R) program, for example, faculty members were, shall we say, “encouraged” to participate by their administrators. This usually happens when there is some kind of problem in the institution that course redesign can address. 

For instance, at one university, the math department had failure rates that were too high. The math faculty was brought more or less kicking and screaming into the program. Because they were worried about coverage, they originally proposed a redesign that would retain lectures, supplemented by computer-based homework. We told them that if they were going to participate in the program, they couldn’t do that because that’s not what course redesign is about. We finally persuaded them to use our process and really redesign the course, and our final workshop at the end of the R2R program was like a “come-to-Jesus meeting.” One member of the math faculty got up and said, “I didn’t think this would work, but now I believe!” It didn’t hurt that their student scores had improved 20 points. 

That was a great example of a conversion, if you will, that was instigated by both external and internal forces. By working with NCAT, campus administrators, and math faculty from other colleges who had gone through the redesign process successfully, they were able to make the changes and achieve outstanding results.

Smith:  How do you account for that transition?

Twigg:  I think we gave them a structure that enabled them to step back and analyze things in a way they hadn’t done before. Having models supported by data from other institutions that had completed successful redesigns also helped them understand the need for emphasizing assessment. At the beginning, we said, “You can try our approach, and if it doesn’t work, you don’t have to keep doing it. But let’s measure the student-learning results from different approaches and see which one works the best.”

Our programs are designed to give institutions support through the transition from the traditional approach to the one used in the redesigns. For example, throughout the process, we have workshops to let faculty and staff share their redesign experiences. 

Finney:  Is there any one discipline where it’s either harder or easier to get from here to there?

Twigg:  Certainly in the beginning of our work, math seemed to be the most difficult discipline when it came to using technology in teaching. For some reason, many mathematicians initially refused to use technology in their teaching. They seemed to think that students need to learn the way they did, using pencil and paper to work out problems. Most people would think math would be the easiest because the content appears relatively cut and dried, but whenever I’m speaking to a large group of faculty and administrators and I refer to math as the most difficult discipline to interest in this sort of redesign, everybody always laughs knowingly. I’ve never had this choice disputed.

Finney:  Carol, have any of these initiatives started in the developmental or remedial area? 

Twigg:  Some of the redesigns cover developmental and remedial levels. Examples include math redesigns at Alabama, Wayne State and Seton Hall. We’re about to start a new project in partnership with the Tennessee Board of Regents that will focus on developmental and remedial education throughout Tennessee. We’ve also encountered a number of faculties who, while not formally participating in one of our programs, have done really interesting work using technology in remedial English. So we certainly see instances of it.

Finney:  The reason I ask is that I’m wondering if you think there is a good link with K–12—making college-level expectations clear.

Twigg:  I think there is very definitely a link. We’ve been doing a lot of work this past year with Jan Somerville at the National Association of System Heads (NASH) and Kati Haycock at the Education Trust. In July, NASH held a meeting of 12 higher-education system heads and six K–12 chiefs to talk about NCAT’s work. They were very enthusiastic about it, and the K–12 chiefs would like us to take on K–12 in addition to higher education. NASH plans to form a task force to consider how our redesign techniques could be implemented in K–12, and we’ll work with that group. I just received a proposal today from Louisiana State University to extend its math redesign into the high schools. So I think we’re going to start to see more involvement of K–12 as the redesign movement grows.

Smith:  I notice that in some of your course redesigns faculty have done an assessment of students both at the beginning and end of the course to see how much they’ve improved.

Twigg:  Yes. We do this in all of our redesign projects.

Smith:  If assessment at the beginning of the course indicated that the student already knows most of the course material, could he or she take a pass on it? If so, that would really be a huge savings. It would be like advanced placement in foreign languages.

Twigg:  It hasn’t happened in that way in the projects thus far, but assessing at the beginning which parts of the course students have already mastered clearly has applications to course redesign. It’s certainly something that we’re encouraging in all of the new programs we work with. I think we’ll see more of it as we move forward. It will be an explicit part of the Tennessee project. 

Competency testing comes up very often when we’re having initial discussions with both systems and institutions, because it’s pretty obvious that students may well know half of the course material and should not need to take the whole course. Developmental courses, in particular, can be redesigned to shorten the time students have to stay in them.

Modularizing course content as part of a course redesign allows this to take place. In traditional formats, if a student completes, say, 60 percent of the coursework, he or she may fail the entire course and have to start over. Modularization can change that. 

Smith:  Can you give some examples?

Twigg:  Sure. Ohio State broke up a five-credit course into five one-credit modules, so if a student passed three of the modules, he or she would get the three credits rather than failing the course. Then the student could go on and take the remaining two credits in the subsequent semester. By using this approach, Ohio State eliminated most of its incompletes, because there was a way for students to finish the course without starting over.

Another variation on the theme: Drexel used to offer one introductory computing course for majors and another for non-majors. In their redesign, they combined the two courses and created modules with different levels of mastery. If you were not a major, you only had to go through Level 3, but if you were a major you had to go through Level 5. Drexel was able to be more efficient by offering one course instead of two.

The redesign also dealt with other issues. Before it, some students thought they wanted to be majors but couldn’t do the work in the course for majors. After the redesign, instead of failing the course, they could just decide to get credit through Level 3. On the other hand, students who originally thought they would only go to Level 3 but found they liked the work more than they had expected and decided to become a major didn’t have to start over. They could go on through Level 5 rather than having to take an additional course.

I should point out that these redesign features have nothing to do with technology but are really about rethinking the whole course and putting the focus on learning and the learner.

Finney:  Have you found that working with a state higher-education system provides more leverage than in working with single institutions?

Twigg:  Although we’ve been using the course as the point of entry for institutional change, now we’re working with more higher-education systems. When course redesign happens at multiple institutions within a system, the faculty will have local examples, and they can talk to others who are doing it. We’re also trying to use the particulars of course redesign to illustrate how to approach a whole range of issues—like assessment, planning, course consistency, faculty roles, change strategies—that arise as part of this type of activity.

Finney:  Have you found it easier or more difficult to work at particular types of institutions?

Twigg:  We’ve tried in various ways to work with small private liberal-arts institutions but without much success. Perhaps it’s because their identity is so tied to small classes that they’re less willing to look at course redesign as one way to address student-learning problems and resource constraints.

Finney:  What about community colleges?

Twigg:  Working with this sector is somewhat difficult because faculty members’ teaching loads sometimes prevent them from becoming involved in large-scale projects, and their lack of resources may make it difficult to support such projects. But we still have had lots of interest from, and successes with, community colleges. 

One of our most successful projects was at Tallahassee Community College, where everybody from adjuncts to members of the Board of Trustees participated in the redesign of English composition, which is not an easy course to tackle. Tallahassee was a model of how to go about this kind of large-scale effort, and they ended up with the biggest gains in learning and the largest cost savings. I often cite Tallahassee as outstanding in a group of high achievers.

Finney:  When institutions know they’re saving all this money, does the question arise about whether the administration is going to take the savings and use them elsewhere?

Twigg:  We try to address that head-on. We encourage institutions to agree on what will happen to the savings in advance, and we also recommend that administrators declare their commitment up front. In every project that we’ve worked with, whatever savings accrue have remained in the unit that generated them. Rewarding the course redesign participants is certainly needed in the beginning. But if course redesign becomes widespread and generates substantial savings, the policy could be modified to split the savings between those who generate it and some other agreed-upon institutional purpose.

We’ve also found that one of the fears people have is that the legislature is going to react to the announced savings by saying ‘We don’t need to give you as much money.’ But the reaction has been just the opposite. Legislatures are so excited to see higher education actually grappling with the cost-and-quality question that they tend to reward the institutions that are doing something to address it. Alabama received additional legislative appropriations to help expand its math project. When institutions show that higher education can be responsive to important public policy issues such as cost containment, they tend to be rewarded rather than punished.

Smith:  Carol, thank you so much for this discussion. We all wish you great success with your new projects, including your new FIPSE-funded project to disseminate and expand your course-redesign methodology.

Susan VanZanten Gallagher has published widely on American literature, South African literature, and Christian higher education. She is a professor of English and director of the Center for Scholarship and Faculty Development at Seattle Pacific University, where she directs a program funded by the Lilly Endowment— Spiritual and Educational Resources for Vocational Exploration (SERVE).