Some College Algebra students come ready to be challenged, but skill gaps make it difficult for many to engage with the content or their peers. This doubly adaptive course retells the story of College Algebra by introducing all function types on day one, engaging students early, and building big ideas.
College Algebra at Oregon State University has recently received a complete redesign from the ground up. The redesign process, which started with the traditional on-campus sections of the course, has now been incorporated into the online sections as well. We have seen success across all student groups with our newly designed model.
We like to say, “we tell a different story of College Algebra,” one that allows multiple opportunities to emphasize the big ideas and for students to make important connections. This presentation will give others information about how and why we decided to focus on big ideas. We will challenge the attendees to reflect on the traditional approach to teaching College Algebra and consider how a drastically different organization of the traditional content may lead students to use a variety of function representations to solve problems, build understanding and engage more deeply with the content.
We have designed a College Algebra course where students prepare with “just in time” review of prerequisite material before coming to class each day. Class time is spent with the student interacting with each other and the material with very little instructor lead content delivery. Course responseware is used during class to gauge student understanding, group students with different levels of understanding together, and guide classroom instruction.
This presentation will also help faculty understand how we employ adaptive technologies to help students prepare before class each day. Thus, allowing more class time to be spent with students interacting productively with each other and the content, and short instructor-facilitated whole-class discussions. As we share examples of in-class responseware questions, attendees will have the opportunity to experience active and adaptive learning and how it facilitates learning the “big ideas” in College Algebra. Participants will learn how these changes in course design have led to improved student retention, performance and engagement.
All of the work completed for the classroom version of College Algebra inspired a complete overhaul of our algebra based online courses. They have been redesigned to incorporate adaptive courseware along with having the students take the metacognitive step of reviewing their own work and sharing their reflections with the class. This has resulted in better student performance in the online College Algebra course and better alignment with the on-campus courses.
We will:
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Discuss the big ideas we are focusing on in College Algebra
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Share the changes we made to the structure of the topics and ways we are navigating the content to reveal big ideas
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Provide instructors with novel strategies for implementing adaptive technologies that can be used in an online or traditional classroom setting.
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Share successes and roadblocks encountered in the process of adding adaptive courseware to an online or traditional classroom-based course.
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Demonstrate how adaptive courseware may be used to prepare students for active learning experiences in class, as well as reinforce concepts learned in class.
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Provide examples of successful active learning activities and adaptive homework assignments from the online and traditional classroom-based course.
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Show how an audience response system can be used to adapt classroom instruction to the particular needs of the students in real time.
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Share student and faculty reactions, along with preliminary data and success stories
We will share the successes from our new approach, including solid improvements in student retention, performance and engagement. We will also share the pitfalls encountered along the way and how we are working to overcome them. Finally we will discuss the process of overhauling a large class and the pieces and people that came together and allowed the redesign to happen so effectively and in such a short time.