Instruction Matters: Purdue Academic Course Transformation (IMPACT) is an institution-wide effort that aims to provide faculty development and support to redesign courses to be more student-centered, including the articulation of learning objectives, appropriate design of course assessments, and the effective use of instructional technologies and engaged pedagogies. Faculty engage in a semester-long workshop series and form faculty learning communities.
IMPACT’s approach to course redesign is flexible, allowing faculty to make many choices regarding the tools and strategies they want to use to achieve their redesign goals. The redesigns are intended to engage students more fully in their learning with the expectation that this will improve student success as well as completion in large enrollment, foundational classes. In turn, greater student success in the classroom can improve retention and graduation rates. The IMPACT program is a large collaborative initiative on the Purdue West Lafayette campus involving multiple key partners across campus including the Office of the Provost, Center for Instructional Excellence (CIE), the Discovery Learning Research Center (DLRC), Information Technologies at Purdue (ITaP), Purdue Libraries, and Purdue Extended Campus (PEC).
IMPACT has been funded internally since 2010 and in its first three years completed the redesign of 63 courses across 9 of the 10 colleges. That number is expected to reach 120 courses by the end of spring 2014, with a particular focus on foundational courses. Funding is planned through at least the end of FY16, with a goal of achieving a steady-state of 60 new course redesigns per year. Data on courses redesigned through IMPACT is consistent with teaching and learning research demonstrating that student-centered environments are associated with increases in student competence, perceived learning gains, and actual student learning, success, and performance.